The Claw of Cthulhu
by Argonaut57
Summary: When an ancient statuette is stolen from the British Museum, there is more at stake than simply an artefact. At the request of an enigmatic official, archaeologist Indiana Jones and aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey must follow a trail from the murkier depths of London Society to the caverns beneath an ancient priory. At stake, possession of the Claw of Cthulhu!
1. Chapter 1

**The Claw of Cthulhu**

 **Chapter One: A Day at the Museum**

In the early summer of 1923, much of London was still in the grip of Egypt-mania. Since that February, when Howard Carter and his party had finally entered the burial camber of Tutankhamun, each week had brought new revelations, new wonders, and everyone who could was taking advantage. Even the august British Museum was not above using the event to attract more visitors.

Lord Peter Wimseys' antiquarian interests were mainly confined to the collection of incunabula – those rare books printed before 1501 – but even he was not immune to the wave of public interest in the Land of the Pharaohs. So this summer afternoon found him strolling through the halls of the Museum on his way to see the latest wonders from the tomb of King Tut.

As he entered the Egyptian Hall, a familiar voice hailed him jovially: "Wimsey? What are you doing here? I didn't think you cared for Egyptian antiquities?"

The man addressing him was perhaps a decade older than Wimsey, about the same height and stockily-built with an open, handsome face.

"Crawley, old chap!" Wimsey replied. "Been an age. How are you?"

"Can't complain." The Earl of Grantham allowed. "Helen, you remember Peter Wimsey?"

The elegant Countess smiled and proffered a hand, which Wimsey bowed over. "Of course, Robert." She said, her American birth obvious in her voice. "You visited us at Downton last autumn, Lord Peter."

"Came up for the huntin'." Wimsey confirmed. "You're here for todays' show?"

"Lecture, please!" The Earl corrected him. "We'd planned to go back this morning, but then I heard about this, so we decided to catch a later train."

"Pity." Wimsey said. "If I'd known you were in Town we could have met up. Well, I'd better find me seat. Me brothers' lettin' me use the lodge in September, maybe you could come up for a days' shootin'?"

"I'd like that." The Earl smiled. "Drop me a line and we'll arrange something."

Wimsey nodded and strolled on. They watched him go, a young man of average height and slim build, with straw-coloured hair and a beak of a nose in a pleasant but slightly foolish-looking face.

"I can never understand why you like him so much." The Countess remarked to her husband. "He doesn't seem to have a brain to call his own."

"That's just his way." The Earl told her. "We served together. Wimsey was a Major in the Rifles, and as fine an officer as I ever knew. If he acts like a carefree fop now, it's because he's had enough horror for a lifetime."

Wimsey had taken the seat allocated to him, a few rows back. A functionary from the Museum was making some typically semi-audible opening remarks. As he came to his peroration, his voice became more confident.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our main speaker for today. He has kindly accepted our invitation to come here from Marshall College in Connecticut. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr Henry Walton Jones, Junior!"

At first glance, a typical tweed-clad academic. But Wimsey never relied on first glances. He actually _looked_ at people. The shoulders under the jacket were just a little too square when they should have been stooped from study. The skin of the handsome face and big hands had a deep tan that spoke of the outdoors more than the library. The jaw was a touch too firm, and the eyes behind the (obviously plain glass) spectacles far too watchful and focused. No common lecturer, then.

Nevertheless, he knew his subject, and was an entertaining speaker. He gave an overview of the times Tutankhamun had lived in, revealing that he was the son of the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who had caused upheaval in Egypt by renouncing the traditional gods in favour of a monotheistic cult of solar worship, renaming himself Akhenaten. Tutankhamun had come to the throne at the age of nine, and under the tutelage of the general Hor-em-Heb and the priest Ai had restored traditional religion.

But the young Pharaoh had barely reigned ten years before dying and being buried in a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The very tomb which Howard Carter had discovered the previous November. The contents of the tomb, Jones explained, were still being catalogued, and many years of study remained before they could be fully understood.

Afterwards, there were questions. One of which was the inevitable one as to why the tomb of a minor Pharaoh contained such riches while the tombs of mightier kings were empty.

"That answer is that this tomb isn't rich." Jones replied. "Not by the standards of others. The written records tell us that much. But the records, and the archaeology, also tell us that most of the other tombs were systematically robbed. Usually within a few years of being sealed.

"Carter has found evidence that somebody tried to break into this tomb, but didn't succeed. Maybe they were caught, maybe they thought better of it. Whichever it was, they never came back, and the tomb was forgotten. Lucky for us.

"But you have to remember, the value of these finds isn't in money, even the gold and jewels. The true value is in what they can tell us about how the Ancient Egyptians lived and what they believed."

Another hand was raised. Female, slender and heavily-beringed. As Jones acknowledged the questioner, Wimsey recognised her as Madame Korova, the self-styled Russian mystic whose well-attended seances had made her an object of adoration for a certain 'set' in London society, and whose 'invitation-only mystical soirées' were attracting the discreet attention of the police.

"Dr Yones," she purred in her obviously-false 'Russian' accent, "are your colleagues in Egypt not afraid of ze wrath zat will fall on zem? Do zey not know zat ze Ka of Tut-ankh-amun will surely take vengeance on zose 'oo desecrate 'is tomb?"

For a moment, the man beneath the academic emerged as Jones flashed her an easy grin. "Lady," he replied, "I've desecrated a few tombs in my time, and never been bothered by a ghost! Traps, bandits, rivals and wild animals, yes, but never spirits.

"If those stories were even close to true, not one of those Pharaohs' tombs would have been even touched. As it is, almost all of them have been stripped. I have to figure that ghostly vengeance was the last of the robbers' worries, even back then.

"Now, I've been called a grave-robber before. People tell me I should respect the dead and leave them be. But, whatever they believed back then, those people don't need the things they were buried with in the afterlife. Experience shows that those things are going to be taken anyway. Would it do anyone any good if they were taken by people who'd melt them down for the gold and re-cut the gems for sale? Or even worse, sell them to some private collector who'll gloat over them in his own home?

"Isn't it better, more respectful, for someone like me or Howard Carter to find those things and put them in a museum where everyone can see them? Where they can be studied and learned from?"

Madame Korova had no answer, and that was the last question. People began to drift away. Jones was just packing his notes away when someone approached him. An elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned suit with a heavy watch-chain. He spoke urgently and quietly to Jones, who seemed to agree with some reluctance and was led off.

 _Odd_. Wimsey thought. He was just about to leave, with a view to an early tea at Claridges', when he was also approached by a stranger. A youngish man, well-built with short-cropped hair and, despite the well-cut suit, a decidedly military air about him.

"Major Wimsey?" He enquired.

Wimsey screwed his monocle in and looked the man up and down. "Just Wimsey, these days, old chap." He said easily. "Lord Peter, if you're bein' formal. Not in the Army any more."

"If we're being formal, your Lordship," the other man replied, "then you're still in the lists as a reserve. Either way, I've been asked to tell you that Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust would like to speak with you."

That was a name out of the past. Despite himself, Wimsey was curious.

"Would he, indeed?" He responded with less of the usual drawl in his voice. "What about, I wonder?"

"If you'll follow me, sir, I'm sure he'll tell you himself. This way, please."

The young fellow led off, and Wimsey followed. There was no point in arguing at this point. He'd see what Sir Pellinore wanted and then decide whether to get involved or not.

The way led through a discreet door out of the public areas of the museum and down several flights of stairs until Wimsey guessed they must be many levels beneath the streets. It seemed the museum resembled an iceberg, with most of its substance under the surface. There were a series of rooms, of varying sizes, each lined with cases, all carefully labelled and catalogued.

But then there was a change. The rooms became larger, more dimly-lit and less frequented. The neat cases and labels were replaced with untidy shelves or clusters of objects. There seemed to be no order about them, and they ranged from the quaintly mundane to the utterly bizarre. In the space of a few yards, Wimsey saw an ancient but ordinary-looking bone whistle, an old Arabian lamp, a massive black iron broadsword (chained to the wall, for some reason) and a stone angel standing facing a mirror -the mirror bore a faded notice warning "Do Not Remove".

Their destination was a larger room – almost as big as one of the halls upstairs – here more lights were on, a fact which Wimsey regretted. The room was given over to statuary and carvings, but none of them were the kind that could be put on public display. It was not the quality – in most cases the workmanship was good, and in some superb – but the subject matter.

Like many Englishmen, Wimsey had a slight taste for the grotesque and the macabre, but what he saw here was far beyond that. This went beyond the weird dreamscapes of the new Surrealist school or the nightmare visions of Bosch into the territory of stark madness. Here were crudely-carved, acephalous, female forms with heavy breasts and gaping wombs. There were bulging-eyed, web-fingered, batrachian perversions of humanity, rendered in appallingly lifelike detail. And those were only the recognisable ones. Many of the things bore no resemblance to any form of life a sane planet could give birth to. Immense, tentacled cones and towering, radiate, starfish-headed monstrosities were only some of them. There was an odd familiarity about some of the pieces, and Wimsey recalled a book an American fellow-collector had sent him. Not an ancient one, but a small, privately-published book of plates taken from the works of the Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman. He had only looked through it once, and the images there were every bit as disturbing as these sculptures.

His guide, apparently unconcerned with the looming horrors that surrounded them, led him into the centre of the chamber. Here the lights were brighter still, and among the statues stood a mall group of men, gathered around an empty plinth.

"Sir Pellinore," Wimseys' escort said, "I brought the Major."

"Very good, carry on, Broughton." Sir Pellinore ordered. "Wimsey. Good to see you again, even under the circumstances."

"I admit I didn't expect to see you again, after my answer to your letter." Wimsey replied.

Sir Pellinore waved the matter aside with a large hand. "Not at all, Wimsey. I'm not one of those chaps who thinks a fellow can go through what you did and come out unscathed, you're no malingerer. The War was over and you'd more than done your part. The business I'm in isn't for anybody who doesn't want to be in it, and you didn't, fair enough.

"But I do notice you've kept yourself busy. Sent a few blackguards to the gallows where they belonged, and saved a few more poor fools who didn't deserve to hang. Good work, you always were the brightest man in the room. When I spotted you here earlier today I wondered about coming over, but there didn't seem a reason to drag up old memories."

"And now there is?" Wimsey asked.

"Not as such, no." Sir Pellinore allowed. "This affair is really more in your line than mine, so when I found out about it, I thought I'd see if you'd be willing to lend a hand." He turned to the rest of the group, who'd been standing by with various degrees of patience. "Gentlemen, this is Lord Peter Wimsey, an old colleague of mine. Wimsey, this is Sir Alfred Duncton, Chief Curator of the Museum." A portly, rubicund gentleman with no hair on his head but magnificent white side-whiskers, who accorded Wimsey a slight bow. "Professor Tarleton, Curator of Extraordinary Antiquities." Slight, frail, grey-haired, he gave a nervous nod. "And I believe you'll recognise Dr Henry Jones."

" _Indiana_ Jones." The American archaeologist stuck out a hand, and the two men exchanged a firm grip. "I saw you at my talk, Lord Wimsey."

"And deuced interestin' it was, Doctor Jones." Wimsey stated. "Not an Egypt expert meself, but you know your onions!"

"Can we get on with this?" Tarleton interrupted in a dry, fussy voice. "My people do not like outsiders or disturbances."

"Quite." Sir Pellinore said. "Wimsey, Dr Jones. You will of course be wondering why I asked you both here so unexpectedly..."

"Not really," Jones put in, "Since we're all gathered round an empty plinth, I guess something's been stolen?"

"Indeed." Tarleton said. "A statuette, some eighteen inches high, made from green stone with white veins, and of remarkable workmanship. The figure represented is a smaller and more finely-worked version of the one directly behind you."

The statue alluded to was some four feet high and carved in granite. It represented a singular monstrosity. The thing was seated on a stone block, its body was humanoid, if rather corpulent, but the feet that rested on the edge of the block as it sat huddled, and the hands that rested on the knees were heavily-clawed, and a pair of wings extended from the shoulders all the way down the back. The true strangeness of the thing was in the head; this was round, and had no face, instead, the front of it was a mass of appendages that might have been antennae, tentacles, neither or both.

"Handsome feller, ain't he?" Wimsey remarked.

"That 'handsome fellow', as you call him, is referred to as Great Cthulhu in a cycle of fragmentary myths found all over the world." Tarleton remarked. "He is a demon, god or priest of some importance!"

"Well," Jones noted, "he's either real dejected, or fast asleep, whatever he is!"

"The latter." Tarleton told him. "Legend has it that Great Cthulhu and his legions wait in a death-like sleep in a submerged city known as R'Lyeh."

"Probably exhausted from pronouncin' their names." Wimsey commented. "So you want us to get this statuette back. Valuable, is it?"

"Not exactly, not in monetary terms." Sir Pellinore replied. "The scholarly value I can't speak to. No, what we want to know is who took it, and more importantly, how they knew it existed and where it was.

"You see, the Extraordinary Antiquities department isn't one everybody knows about. Their job is to curate and study things that don't fit into our knowledge and ideas about the past. I'm told there are artefacts in here, for instance, which hint that human civilisation is far older than current archaeology can prove. Objects that indicate that stories we call myths might actually be true.

"Now if we released everything there is here to the public, there'd be all kinds of trouble. The Churches wouldn't like it, for one thing. For another, a lot of people would take up these studies, first-class minds that we need to be doing something more useful and relevant than chasing up old stories. So we keep it all here, where it can be studied by a few specialists, until we turn up enough evidence to either prove something a sham, or make it safe to release."

"So the job could only have been done by somebody who knows about this place." Jones concluded. "How many people actually know about it?"

"Hard to say, exactly." Sir Pellinore admitted. "In the Museum, only the Senior Curators, the researchers who work here and a few Special Custodians.

"Beyond that, the PM, the Home Secretary, their Permanent Secretaries and some people in my Department. Then there's the Warehouse and the Torchwood Institute – they vet everything that comes in here and take away the dangerous stuff for safe-keeping or special study. There's the other lot as well, but they keep to themselves and clean up their own messes, mostly.

"But out of all those people, only the ones who work here should actually know where these rooms are."

As Sir Pellinore spoke, Wimsey had been working his way out from the empty plinth in expanding circles. Now he suddenly held up his hand and approached a statue. It was of a large, tree-like creature and carved from rough sandstone. Wimsey peered carefully at a spot on the surface, then propped his cane up against the statue. Reaching into a pocket, he drew out a leather case, from which he took a pair of tweezers. With these he teased some fibres off the rough stone and placed them in a small envelope he produced from another pocket. The he picked up his cane and seemed to measure the statue, at least from the floor to the spot he had found the fibres.

"Good job I like to be prepared for anythin'." He remarked. "Whoever came in here must have brushed against this statue. Your own people would know where it was and wouldn't walk into it like that. Whoever it was stood about five foot four and was either a woman or an Oriental man."

"How'd you work that out?" Jones asked.

Wimsey held up his cane. "It's marked in feet and inches on one side and centimetres on the other." He said. "That's how I got the height. For the rest, those threads are silk, if I'm any judge. Chaps don't usually wear silk, unless they're Orientals, but women wear it a lot."

"No women or Orientals are currently employed here." Tarleton said.

"Then somebody who does work here must have let the cat out of the bag." Wimsey said.

"That is entirely possible." Tarleton sighed. "The work we do here attracts a particular type of individual. Many of them are unduly sensitive – some claim to be psychic. Unfortunately a good deal of our work – especially the translations – relies as much upon highly-developed intuition as on pure intellect.

"But such people are notoriously impressionable, and it is possible someone let something slip in the wrong company."

"It would still have to mean something to whoever heard it, though." Jones pointed out. "There can't be many people in London who'd even recognise the name of this Cthulhu character, much less want to steal a statue of him!"

Wimsey snapped his fingers. "Of course!" He said. "Now I remember. Thought the name seemed familiar. It's mentioned in some of the books in my collection!"

Duncton spoke for the fist time, in a melodious baritone. "Collection?" He asked. "Ah! So you are that Peter Wimsey? The collector of incunabula?"

"Guilty as charged." Wimsey admitted.

"You'll pardon me, Lord Peter," Duncton said, "but you did not use your title in your dealings with the Museum. You were generous enough to donate several unique volumes to us last year."

Wimsey shrugged. "You find all kinds of things pokin' around in old bookshops. Those books were far too rare to be sittin' on my shelf. Here's the best place for 'em."

It was immediately apparent that Dr Jones was making a rapid and favourable reassessment of Wimsey. "You figure we might find something in those books that'll help?"

"Anythin's possible." Wimsey allowed. "But I'd like to find out who would want to steal the thing, and why."

"I might be able to assist there." Sir Pellinore informed them. "I don't have much time for that sort of thing myself, but I've a friend who's interested in the whole occult business. He lives in Curzon Street. I'll drop him a note to give you an appointment. I'm taking it that you're both interested in helping us with this?"

"Of course I am." Jones said firmly. "Some things belong in a museum, where they can be studied, even if the public can't see them. I hate it when people steal antiquities for their own purposes."

"As for me," Wimsey said, "I've got nothin' on at the moment, and I do enjoy a puzzle."

"So the only problem we have," Jones said, "is that I'm due on a boat back to the States tomorrow!"

"I'll see to that," Sir Pellinore told him. "and arrange matters with your college. You won't find yourself out of pocket, I assure you."

"If you need somewhere to stay," Wimsey ventured, "I've a guest bedroom you can use."

"Sounds fine, if it's no trouble." Jones replied with a grin. "I'm used to roughing it!"

"Don't let my man Bunter hear you say that!" Wimsey cautioned. "Unless you like your toast burnt and your bacon cold!"

"I will arrange for the names and addresses of all current staff in this department to be sent to you, Lord Peter." Tarleton said. "I also have several plaster casts -complete in every detail -of the stolen statuette. I'll have one sent round, it may be of help."

"Well in that case, if you're done with us, Sir Pellinore, we'll be on our way." Wimsey said.

Outside the Museum, Wimesy turned to his new acquaintance and said. "We'd best start by goin' to your hotel. You can arrange for your traps to be sent over to my house, and I can telephone Bunter to expect them and get the room ready.

"We've both missed tea, so how about an early dinner at one of my clubs? Nobody listens to anyone elses' conversation in a club dining room – bad form, y'know -so it's as good a place as any to start plannin'!"

"It's your town, Lord Wimsey!" Jones replied.

Wimsey grimaced. "Just 'Wimsey' will do, Jones. If you want to use the title, it's 'Lord Peter', but I'd rather you didn't. I'm only a Lord because me father was a Duke, it's a courtesy title."

Jones grinned. "I guess we Republican Colonials are always getting those thing wrong, huh?"

Wimsey chuckled. "Wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't all so complicated to start with!" He replied. "Even we can't always get it right. But you never put a title in front of a surname without the Christian name in between."

"I'll try to remember that." Jones told him. "Do all English gentlemen carry canes with measures marked in the sides?"

Wimsey shook his head. "I had this one specially made." He explained. "It's my _vade mecum_ , my indispensable companion. As well as the measures, it has a steel ferrule, a compass in the handle and a sword inside it."

"All handy." Jones allowed. "Though I find a gun more useful than a sword."

"I'd noticed." Wimsey said. "I carry one too, but mine's an automatic. A revolver like yours does spoil the line of a chaps' suit."

They dined at the largest and least exclusive of Wimsey's clubs, simply because you could take a guest there without prior arrangement. The large dining room was more than half empty at this early hour, and they had no trouble finding a table in a quiet corner. Over lamb cutlets and new potatoes, Jones turned to the matter at hand.

"You do realise, don't you, that there's more to this than a stolen sculpture." He said.

"Quite." Wimsey responded. "Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust doesn't personally intervene in anythin' that simple. I learned that durin' the War."

"I'll bet, and I'm not going to ask about any of that." Jones said. "But there's something I know that maybe you don't, and Sir Pellinore – I got that right? Sir Pellinore doesn't know I know.

"I did my part in the War, too, and I met a guy, He was a Secret Service agent, a real good guy, called Sawyer. We were out in the field once, and some German was taking pot-shots at us. Sawyer lined up from nearly a mile away and dropped the guy with one shot!

"I asked him where he learned to shoot like that, and he told me he'd been taught by an Englishman. Guy called Quatermain."

" _Allan_ Quatermain?" Wimsey asked. "Chap who found King Solomons' Mines?"

"The same." Jones averred. "Sawyer said he'd worked with Quatermain and some others in 1900 on a big secret mission to do with the arms race. He told me they worked from a base under the British Museum. I thought he was just spinning a yarn for a while. But then I found out from somebody else that Quatermain was killed in 1900 while on a job for the Government. Now I find out that there's a lot more under that Museum than just store-rooms, and a high-up British official is getting hot under the collar about somebody outside knowing about it."

"So you're sayin' that the fact of somethin' bein' stolen is less important than the fact that somebody knew where to steal it from?" Wimsey asked.

"That's what I'm guessing." Jones confirmed. "Look, Sawyer is as much of a legend in the Secret Service as James West and Artemius Gordon. Why would a guy like that need to tell tall tales about Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo unless they were true?"

Wimsey nodded. "I think you're right, Jones. The more so because Sir Pellinore holds a post that, if my sources are correct, was once held by Mycroft Holmes, the brother of Sherlock Holmes.

"I don't think anybody but Tarleton cares about the statuette, Jones. But I think they're awfully keen to find out who knows about what's under the Museum and how they know it!"


	2. Chapter 2

**The Claw of Cthulhu**

 **Chapter Two: An Evening At Madame Zorovas'**

Indiana Jones could happily have spent a week browsing Wimseys' collection of ancient volumes. However, this was business, and the two men were selective in what they looked at.

"Here we are!" Wimsey said. "The _Liber Ivonis_ or _Book of Eibon_ , the _Cthaat Aquadingen_ , Ludwig Prinns' _De Vermis Mysteriis_. and the _Necronomicon_ in Olaus Wormius' translation from the Greek.

"Not sure which of them mention this Cthulhu chappie, so we'll just have to look through them all! Hope your Latin's up to scratch, Jones!"

"It's good." Jones replied. "How's yours?"

Wimsey gave a wry smile. "Public School boy, old chap. They taught us more Latin than they did English!"

There were mentions of Cthulhu in most of the books, generally in connection with either the 'Old Ones' or 'Other Gods', with whom he was deemed to have a kinship, or to serve as their priest. The _Cthaat Aquadingen_ was the only one to devote more than a mention to Cthulhu himself.

"Hmm," Wimsey mused, "says here that Cthulhu and his 'spawn' came to Earth from the stars in prehistoric times. Sea-goin' race who built a lot of cities in what's now the Pacific. Had lots of wars with another lot called the Elder Things until somethin' happened to them.

"Accordin' to this the stars changed and that forced them to sink their cities under the sea and go to sleep in them till the stars go right again. Chappie here claims that Cthulhu influences people in their dreams to worship him. Also, he's supposed to be a big noise with some race called the Deep Ones?"

"The Deep Ones I know about." Jones said. "You find the cult on a lot of Pacific islands. Some kind of merfolk that come out of the sea from time to time. Legend is that they can make the fish swarm around any island, and they use that, and gold, to strike a bargain with the natives."

"What kind of a bargain?" Wimsey asked.

"Seems these Deep Ones are pretty keen on mating with humans." Jones told him. "In return for fish and gold, they get to marry some of the sons and daughters of the islanders and raise kids with them. Story goes that the kids live longer than ordinary people, and after a certain age, they go into the sea to live with the other Deep Ones.

"They also like the islanders to worship their gods, Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, but I never heard the stories mention Cthulhu."

"Sounds like fairy-tales to me." Wimsey said. "Like the Little Mermaid, but on an industrial scale, what?"

"That's what most people think." Jones agreed. "But the stories we get are from natives on islands the Deep Ones never went to. Reason for that is that the natives of these other islands tend to get war-parties together and wipe out the islanders who deal with the Deep Ones. They always say that they had to do it because by that time nobody on those islands was really human any more.

"I've been to one of those islands myself, and it was kinda strange. The war-party didn't loot anything. What they could, they burned. The rest they piled up and their shamans put some kind of magic circle around it, made it taboo. I found some gold in there. Jewellery that obviously wasn't made by islanders, in a kind of pale gold I've never seen anywhere else.

"They burned the bodies as well, but what was left showed a lot of deformities. We had a doctor with us who figured that there'd been a mass outbreak of leprosy or something like it, and that the other islanders cleared the place out to stop it spreading.

"Doesn't explain the weird jewellery, though."

Just then, the door opened and Wimseys' manservant, Bunter, entered the room. He was carrying a tray on which were a bottle of whisky, a soda syphon, two glasses and a substantial plate of sandwiches.

"I took the liberty, your Lordship, of preparing a small supper, since you took dinner early." He said. "Might I also remind you, gentlemen, that the papers from the museum will be arriving tomorrow. I am sure you will wish to look over them before your appointment."

"Which is Bunters' subtle way of tellin' us we ought to get to bed!" Wimsey told Jones. "Room to your likin', old chap?"

"It's great!" Jones confirmed. "But I'm not used to having my gear unpacked and put away for me, Mr Bunter. I can take care of myself."

"Just 'Bunter', sir, if you please." The former sergeant replied imperturbably. "A guest should never have to look after himself. His Lordship is fully capable of taking care of himself while in the field, so to speak, but again, should not have to at home."

"Bunter likes to remind me who's in charge, from time to time." Wimsey explained.

The following morning was spent delving into less arcane, but equally intriguing, documents.

"These Museum types are deuced thorough about checkin' on their employees!" Wimsey remarked, looking through his second fat file.

"Tarleton told us they looked for a specific type of person." Jones pointed out. "Studying and curating all that weird stuff, you'd need to be a bit unconventional in your thinking, I'd say."

"You're right, of course, old chap." Wimsey allowed. "And if what we talked about last night is anywhere near the mark, they'll be lookin' for people who either know when to look the other way, or keep their mouths shut."

"I notice most if not all of them seem to have gone to your Public Schools." Jones said after a while."

"That's par for the course, I'm afraid." Wimsey noted. "There are still a lot of places a grammar-school education won't get you into, no matter how good it is. Of course, for this kind of work, a good groundin' in Classics – Latin and Greek -is a pretty basic requirement. A fellow can rely on a Public School for that, if nothin' else."

"You have a problem with Public Schools?" Jones asked.

"Not at all." Wimsey told him. "Eton man meself. But towards the end of the War, we were runnin' out of what they used to call 'officer class' chaps. Chaps like me. We're taught to lead from the front, so a lot of us got killed. So they started promotin' some of the other chaps, middle-class types. Lot of people thought it would be a disaster, but it worked. Can't tell the quality of a man from where he went to school, Jones!

"Now, this is interestin'."

"You got something?" Jones asked.

"Might have." Wimsey replied. "Chap here, the Hon Dr Cuthbert Collinsford. Accordin' to his list of memberships, he belongs to the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn."

"That supposed to mean something?" Jones asked. "Sounds like some kind of risqué gentlemans' club to me. Or a half-way house for people the Freemasons won't allow in."

"Closer on the second than the first." Wimsey allowed. "There are lots of Spiritualist and occult clubs and societies around, but the Golden Dawn is one of the oldest, founded in the last century. I don't know much about it other than one of its' members, chap named Aleister Crowley, came across my sights a couple of times.

"Crowley's a thoroughly bad lot. Uses drugs, abuses women and men indiscriminately and lives off others. Sister of a University chum of mine got into his clutches while I was still at Balliol. Frobisher and I went to see the fellow and taught him some manners before he'd quite ruined the girl. I've kept an eye on him since. He was in America during the War, wrote anti-British propaganda for a pro-German paper there. He's in Italy now, but I hear the Italians are about to chuck him out."

"You think he's behind this?" Jones wanted to know.

"Doubt it, but if this Order produced a traitor, a thief shouldn't be beyond imagining. Maybe this chap we're meeting later might know something."

"It's the nearest thing to a link we've found." Jones admitted. "Why don't we call Tarleton and ask if we can speak with this Collinsford guy?"

"Thought that meself." Wimsey agreed. "But right now, it's high time for lunch. I know a place in Mayfair that's only five minutes from Curzon Street."

The Duke de Richleau was a slender man, rather above the middle height, with a handsome aquiline face and penetrating grey eyes. He welcomed them courteously and led them into his study, a room crowded with rare objects and rarer books. Jones whistled quietly.

"Quite the collection you have here, Duke!" He commented.

de Richleau nodded. "True, but unlike you, Dr Jones, I did not obtain them by my own efforts. My father was an exiled French nobleman, my mother a Russian Countess. All of this is family property from both sides. I was fortunate enough, and determined enough, to recover it all before the Bolsheviks got their grubby hands on it.

"But I think you are not here to discuss my little hoard. Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust is by way of being a friend, but even were this not the case, I am aware enough of your reputations to be at least curious as to how I may assist you.

"Dr Indiana Jones, son of the legendary if eccentric Dr Henry Jones, and an archaeologist of note in your own right. Lord Peter Wimsey, younger son of the late Mortimer Duke of Denver and brother of the present Duke, former Major of Rifles, occasional intelligence operative, now turned amateur detective of parts. An unusual but formidable partnership.

"So, please be seated gentlemen. Feel free to smoke if you wish. I have some excellent Hoyo de Monterrey cigars if it is not too early in the day. Now, what is it you wish to speak of?"

Wimsey and Jones made short work of filling de Richleau in on the case, and on what they had uncovered so far. The Duke nodded.

"The Golden Dawn is one of those bodies which mostly draws harmless eccentrics. Respectable people fascinated by the occult who wish to play at being magicians. Individuals who find the Freemasons too tame and the Rosicrucians too demanding. They are dilettantes of magic, who precede or round off their rituals with a good dinner and a bottle of wine, whereas any true Adept of the Right-Hand Path knows that the consumption of red meat and alcoholic drink within twenty-four hours of such rituals renders them at best ineffective and at worst dangerous. Of course, their fictional rituals – penned by their founder MacGregor-Mathers – are not true magic, and so they are largely harmless.

"But they do have their darker side. Such societies inevitably draw their share of fraudsters, libertines and crooks. Usually they prey on the more gullible members promising to reveal greater secrets in exchange for cash or other favours. But they also draw members from artistic circles, and even from your circles, Lord Peter.

"Lately, however, they have lost some of their brightest stars."

"How so?" Jones asked.

"Tempted away." The Duke replied. "Tempted away by the wondrous Madame Zorova."

"Hey, I know her!" Jones said. "That dame at the lecture yesterday with the fur and all the jewels, who asked about the curse of the Pharaohs."

"She claims to be a Russian exile – a medium and mystic." Wimsey noted.

de Richleau gave a short laugh. "Madame Zorovas' cradle lay many miles west of Russia." He stated. "She was born Marie Ducotte, in an alley in Paris, the daughter of a woman of the streets from one of many casual remunerative encounters. Marie began her career at sixteen, as a nude at the _Folies Bergere_ and occasional artists' model. She graduated to become a conjurers' assistant and learned the tricks of his trade, which she now puts to her own uses, along with the stagecraft she learned at the music hall. She is an absolute charlatan, and, if my friend Mr Reeder at the Prosecutors' Office is to be believed, a blackmailer."

"Interestin'." Wimsey said. "Deuced odd for her to be at the Museum that very day!"

"I was thinking so." Jones replied. "Duke, what about this Cthulhu thing?"

de Richleaus' lip curled. "I know of the cult. You can find it's adherents in any large port. They are a poor lot, the dregs of the dockside, or crews on disreputable freighters whose captains are not above a little piracy. Mixed-blood, many of them. Drunkards, opium addicts, thieves and murderers. They gather in secret to venerate hideous idols, supposedly of incredible antiquity, in revolting orgies. They claim that Great Cthulhu sleeps in R'lyeh, but that one day the city will rise and Cthulhu and his spawn will sweep the world clear of humanity. The cultists are so degraded and miserable in their lives that their only pleasure is in the anticipation of their own destruction, as long as everyone else is destroyed with them."

"They don't," Jones opined, "sound like the kind of people to pull off a heist like this."

"No, and that intrigues me." The Duke agreed. "It can only mean one of two things. Either the cult has acquired converts of a better class or intellect than usual, which I find unlikely, or there is something about that particular sculpture. Something unique and significant to someone prepared to go to considerable lengths to obtain it.

"Either way, I have contacts in occult circles, and will see if I can find anything out. In the meantime, gentlemen, I suggest you continue your own investigations. The chances are that this is a purely criminal matter."

"I believe you to be on the right track with regard to Collinsford, gentlemen." Tarleton told them. "When I intimated to him this morning that you wished to speak with him, he became extremely agitated. Shortly thereafter he came to my office and tendered his resignation. I immediately questioned him further, but he gave me to understand that he would only speak with the two of you, and in private. I have placed my office at your disposal, and he is waiting there.

"Naturally, I have taken his resignation as a tacit admission of involvement in the matter, but I leave it to you to decide whether or not any criminal action is involved. If the man has said too much in his cups, or anything of that kind, his resignation is enough. I would rather avoid a prosecution, for the Museums' sake. By the same token, if some personal matter is at the root of things, I expect you to keep any confidences Collinsford might offer to yourselves."

Dr the Hon Cuthbert Collinsford was not a typical academic, but a handsome, well-built and fashionably dressed man in his late twenties. Nevertheless, he was pale and drawn, and his eyes were full of fear and shame. They also had dark rings beneath them that spoke of sleepless nights. The two men introduced themselves, but he interrupted them.

"I know you, Lord Peter. I dare say you don't remember me, but I was a few years below you at Eton."

Wimsey squinted at the man through his monocle, then snapped his fingers. "Of course!" He exclaimed. "Fancy Collinsford! Dreadfully sorry, old chap, but it's been years!"

Collinsford shook his head. "A lot has happened since, Lord Peter, and I was never in your set. You know what I was...a tart, they used to call it."

It was Wimseys' turn to shake his head. "Never took much notice of that sort of thing. Me father told me it happened before I went to school. He also said that the chaps grow out of it."

"Not all of them." Collinsford said with a half-smile. "Some of them do it for money, or extra tuck. Some of them because it's the only way they get any affection. But I enjoyed it, I still do. That's the difficulty I'm in."

"Meanin' what, exactly?" Wimsey asked. "It's just between the three of us, old chap."

As he talked, Collinsford seemed to calm, as if simply letting it out was helpful. "I've always between interested in the occult, in magic, and it seemed to me the Ancients knew things about the world that we've forgotten with all our science and engineering. It's why I studied what I did and how I got this post.

"I was looking for like-minded people - quite apart from the other thing, you understand – so I joined the Golden Dawn. When Madame Korova came to London, I attended one of the public seances. I was so impressed that I went to see her afterwards, to ask if she would join the Order -they've always admitted women as well as men. But she said that her Secret Master had a disagreement with the Orders' Secret Chiefs, so she couldn't join. She did invite me to one of her private seances, though.

"I actually went to several, and they were truly remarkable. Madame began to take an interest in me. She said the currents were better whenever I was there, and that I must be a strong conduit. She asked me a lot about myself and what I did, and I'm afraid I told her more than I ought. Especially about the statue room, where I did most of my work."

"Clever woman." Jones commented. "Knew exactly which strings to pull, huh?"

"Looking back on it, I suppose so." Collinsford admitted. "Anyway, last week I was finally invited to one of the 'mystical soirées'. It's a big thing in the set to be asked to one of those, and you have to promise never to talk of what goes on there.

"They happen in the ballroom of her house, which is all hung with special draperies, and has a stage with an altar at one end. Madame performs a ritual – a really impressive one – which produces a chalice. The attendants fill goblets with the elixir from the chalice, and everyone has to drink it.

"Things became...strange after that. I don't remember a great deal, other than being almost ecstatic and seeing visions of some sort.

"But then a day or so later, I received an envelope, delivered by messenger. It contained photographs. I won't say what of, but I was in them. A letter with them said that unless I wanted my employer to see the pictures, I was to leave a certain door unlocked in the Museum yesterday, between certain times, then lock it again.

"You have to understand, what was in those photographs would have meant dismissal, disgrace, probably prison. I would be a ruined man! And all of that could be avoided by simply leaving a door unlocked for an hour.

"When I heard of the theft, even then, I kept quiet. The statuette is ancient yes, and unique, but we have dozens of images of Cthulhu. For the purposes of our studies, one more or less doesn't matter. But now I understand that there are bigger things at stake, so I've told you everything. What happens now?"

"To you? Nothin'" Wimsey said. "You've been a silly young fool and put yourself in the hands of a blackmailer, but that can be dealt with discreetly. I'll bet you're not the only one, and there'll be some influential folk who'd rather cover it all up than be caught in a scandal.

"You have to resign, but you've already done that, and I'll see to it that you get a good reference. Here's my card. Come and see me in a couple of weeks. If one old Etonian can't find another one a job, the world's gone to Hell in a handcart. I can also point you in the direction of a fellow I know who can introduce you to a club where you can meet other chaps who..er..share your interests, so to speak."

In the cab back to Wimseys' house, Jones commented. "For a minute or two back there, I didn't catch on to what you guys were talking about. Collinsford could go to jail, couldn't he?"

"You think he should?" Wimsey asked.

Jones shook his head. "Locking people up for what they do is one thing. Locking them up for what they are is the thin edge of a very nasty wedge. I've seen that in other countries. A man can be locked up for being the wrong tribe, or the wrong colour in some places. It never ends well.

"But I was a bit surprised that you took it so calmly."

"Boardin' school, Jones." Wimey replied. "If you take 1200 young lads, all in the process of growin' into men, and lock 'em away from everythin' for months on end, then somethin's bound to happen.

"In my last year at Eton, they caught one of my housemates in bed with a younger boy. The young lad got lines and the older one got a whackin'. A week later, they caught another older pupil in bed with one of the maids. They expelled him and dismissed her without a character. Funny old world, ain't it?"

"We're lucky she's holdin' one of her mystical evenin's tonight." Wimsey remarked. "Everyone will be in the ballroom, so we'll have a clear run for the rest of the house."

They were dressed in workmen's overalls, with woollen caps on their heads. It was not, Wimsey had explained, a disguise as such, "No self-respectin' British workman would be anywhere but the pub at this time of night!", but the clothes were dark and easy to move in. They were walking down a wide pasage between the backs of two streets.

"I gotta say," Jones commented, "your back alleys here are kinda wider than most!"

Wimsey chuckled. "This isn't a back alley, Jones! This is what they call a 'mews'. When these houses were built, horses and carriages were still the only way to get about, so upper-class people had to have somewhere to keep 'em. Behind all those gates are stables, coach-houses and the places where the grooms and coachmen lived. Nowadays they're used to keep the cars and chauffeurs.

"Don't you have 'em over there?"

Jones shrugged. "Maybe in the older cities like Boston, but I never saw one. We Americans aren't big on keeping our old buildings standing. We knock them down and build new ones when we can.

"This is the place."

"Good." Wimsey said. "Now we're lookin' for a door that opens into the scullery. That's where the maids used to bring the meals out to the grooms, and it'll be where the chauffeur gets in for his meals. Otherwise he'd have to walk round the house to get in by the area door. If we're lucky, most of the maids will have gone to bed - they have to be up at four in the mornin' - but the footmen and the kitchen staff might be awake yet, to see to the guests or if there's a supper.

"They'll be in the kitchen, listenin' for bells from upstairs. If we're quick and quiet, we can slip past the kitchen door and get upstairs without anyone knowin'"

There was a small postern door let into the large gates, the lock of which Wimsey deftly picked. Jones was tempted to ask how a British aristocrat had acquired that particular skill, but decided he might not like the answer. The area beyond the gate was surprisingly large. The big garage door was open, and there was a dim light in the recesses of the building, enough to show the outline of a sleek Daimler. There was also the sound of two male voices in conversation.

Wimsey seemed to know where he was going, and Jones followed him, keeping to the shadows around the edges of the yard. At one point, they were very close to the garage, and Jones ventured as glance through a nearby window. Two men were standing by a workbench where a single light burned. One was a tall, well-built young man in livery, the other a wiry, older man in shirt and trousers. They were smoking and discussing, with some intensity, the relative merits of West Ham and 'the Spurs' – whatever those might be.

"Good for us." Wimsey murmured. "If one of the footmen is out here, scullery door is bound to be unlocked."

A scullery, Jones noted, appeared to be some kind of laundry and dish-washing room. The two men slipped through it and into a corridor with several doors along it and a staircase at the far end. The door nearest the scullery was partially open, sending a narrow wedge of light into the corridor. There was the sound of voices in desultory conversation, and the clink of crockery and cutlery. Clearly the servants were taking the opportunity to have their supper. As the two men slipped quietly past, they heard a woman announce that, on her day out, she and her young man were going to the flickers to see the new Harold Lloyd.

They made their way up the stairs, Jones concentrating on what Wimsey had told him about the probable layout of the house.

"Basement's just the workin' parts," he had said, "kitchen, scullery, butlers' pantry, store-rooms and so on. Ground floor, mornin' room, drawin' room, parlour, hall. First floor, ballroom, dinin' room, billiard room, that kind of thing. Second floor is the one we want, it'll have the library and study as well as sittin' rooms. Third floor bed and bath. Attics servants' rooms.

"We're lucky it's a town house. There won't be too many servants and some of 'em will probably live out. We'll use the servants' stairs, of course."

As they advanced, Jones realised why the servants' stairs were best for this. They were out of sight, sometimes actually in the walls, accessed by discreet or hidden doors, and had a layer of coconut matting on the floors that effectively muffled their footsteps. As they passed through the first floor, they began to hear chanting. It grew louder as they proceeded, until they reached one door that was open.

It led into a small, semi-circular area, separated from whatever was beyond by a waist-high wall and thick curtains. Folded chairs and stands arranged at one side indicated that it was usually occupied by musicians, and Jones realised they must be in the ballroom. Through a gap in the curtains, light came. Not the bright glare of electrical lights, but the flickering orange of flames.

Driven by curiosity rather than caution, both men risked a peep through the curtains. The ballroom was crowded with robed figures, all with fillets around their heads, roughly equal numbers of men and women. They were all looking at a dais at the far end, where an elaborate and rather fanciful altar had been erected. Jones, with the eye of an archaeologist, saw imagery from Greek, Roman, Egyptian and even Mithraic temples, all randomly jumbled together.

Around the altar, in patterns and stances that were more about showmanship than worship, were a dozen or so apparent acolytes, male and female. All young, all good-looking, all wearing an absolute minimum of clothing.

Before the altar itself stood Madame Zorova, but very different from the elaborately-dressed lady who had questioned Jones at the Museum. The thick, jet-black hair was loose, cascading down her back and restrained only by an Egyptian-style headband bearing a cobra-head in front. An elaborate jewelled collar was round her neck, from which a long white robe fell to her bare feet. This robe, though it covered her entire form, was so sheer that it hid nothing of the sensuous figure beneath, and her posture – arms flung wide, head and shoulders back – was clearly meant to emphasise her physical assets to the full.

She was speaking in a clear, full alto that could be heard in every part of the room.

"Athena, Isis, ibis-headed Thoth, thrice-mighty Hermes! You who lit the lamps of wisdom in nighted Khem and ancient Hellas. You who preserved that light among the Chosen while Man suffered under the iron hand of jealous Jehovah. Aid us now in rekindling the ancient fires!

"Bring us again to the joy of Life Unfettered and Knowledge Shared. Help us to free our fellow men and women from the shackles of Thou Shalt Not and bring them to the liberty of Do What Thou Wilt.

"Fill the sacred chalice with the Draught of Inspiration, that we might learn your secrets and free our inner force!"

Wimsey and Jones shared a glance, then slipped away.

As they had expected, the second floor held what they were looking for. What had once been the library had been converted into a large photographic laboratory.

"They're usin' Kodaks, but doin' the developin' and copyin' themselves." Wimsey noted. "Where are they keepin' the negatives?"

The answer was not far to seek. Adjacent to the library was a study, which was lined with filing cabinets. Under the letter 'C' they found a folder labelled 'Collinsford, Cuthbert' containing both negatives and prints.

Wimsey shook his head. "Poor Fancy!" He noted. "I've seen some pretty embarassin' photos in my time, but this puts a new level on compromisin'. Chap he's with is a very well-made young fellow!

"But I do wonder why the negatives at least aren't in a safe?"

"Looks like she's in the process of buying one." Jones, who had been going over the desk, told him. "Letter here from a firm that makes and fits them. She probably needed to build up some capital first -those things ain't cheap."

He rummaged further, finally opening the deep bottom drawer and giving a bark of laughter. "Well, look who's here!" He pulled out the image of Cthulhu that had been taken from the Museum.

"Good!" Wimsey replied. "Two birds with one stone. Anythin' in there to tell us why she wanted it?"

"Just a map." Jones told him. "Not sure where of, but it's got a square drawn on it and a couple places marked. We can take a closer look when we get back. Right now, I think we should get out of here."

They went back the way they had come, quickly and quietly. All went well until they reached the yard. They had just slipped out into the mews proper when a brilliant beam of light captured them both. As they squinted against it, a dry, rather apologetic voice said:

"Would you both kindly remain perfectly motionless? Lord Peter Wimsey? Dear me!"

The light went off, and as the after-glare cleared, they saw a man approaching them. A slender, weak-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, wearing an old-fashioned frock coat, pinstripe trousers and a flat-crowned bowler hat. The face was thin, and decorated with side-whiskers of a decidedly old-fashioned cut. But the thin mouth was set, and the eyes behind the round spectacles unwavering, as was the hand that held the automatic pistol.

"Allow me to introduce myself, Lord Peter. I am John Reeder, of the Public Prosecutors' Office. The premises from which you have just exited, in a highly-suspect manner, are about to be raided by myself and my colleagues from the Metropolitan Police.

"Given the nature of the suspected crimes being carried out within, am I to assume that you and your colleague have been engaged in the recovery of certain items?"

"Somethin' stolen from the British Museum and some embarassin' photos of an old school chum who works there." Wimsey admitted. "You're deuced quick, Reeder."

"Hardly that, Lord Peter." Reeder said, putting away his gun. "I simply have an unfortunate turn of mind. I see wrong in everything, you see. So when a former nude from a Paris music hall takes a flat in London, one suspects a generous lover. When she poses as a medium and holds private seances, then proceeds to lease an expensive house, one suspects fraud. But when she then spends significant sums on the latest photographic equipment, it is reasonable, given her former profession, to assume the production of pornography.

"However, when that person then holds secretive gatherings, after which she begins to purchase expensive motor-cars, furs and jewellery, then one is forced to conclude that blackmail is taking place. A suspicion that can only be confirmed when one catches the brother of a Peer of the Realm, a man known to discreetly resolve 'difficulties' for friends and relatives, leaving her premises by the mews, in the dead of night, dressed as a workman.

"Given that you are accompanied by a distinguished archaeologist – yes, I recognise you, Dr Jones – I can only assume that the object stolen was ancient and possibly unique, and that the photographic images you speak of were used to persuade the Museum employee to facilitate the theft.

"Under the circumstances, we will say no more of the matter, and I will bid you both goodnight. However, should I require assistance from either of you in the future, I do hope that it will be forthcoming."

"You put things together pretty fast, Mr Reeder." Jones commented.

Reeder shook his head dolefully. "It is my curse, Dr Jones." He replied. "I have a criminal mind."


	3. Chapter 3

**The Claw of Cthulhu**

 **Chapter Three: The Image, the Map and the Legend**

Back in Wimsey's library, his Lordship lifted the cover from a plate of thick ham sandwiches ("Good old Bunter!") and poured out two glasses of port. Jones took the sculpture from the bag he had placed it in and set it on the desk. As he reached for the proffered glass, Wimsey said. "What's that on your hand, Jones?"

Jones looked with some surprise at the black lines on his palm. He rubbed at them with his other hand, causing them to smear and fade slightly, then he sniffed at them.

"Ink." He said. "Some kind of printing ink. Now where?"

He picked up the statuette again, and this time tuned it over.

"Look here, Wimsey!" He said. "There's some kind of pattern on the bottom of this thing. Not just the texture of the stone, that's really smooth, like marble. This was carved on.

"Somebody's used it to print something, like kids do with potatoes. See where the ink still is? That's how it got onto my hand. The stone doesn't absorb it, so it didn't dry completely."

"Well, ain't that interestin'?" Wimsey noted. "Wait a bit!" He went over and took the plaster cast replica that Tarleton had sent over. "Yes," he said, "the carvin's on this as well.

"Look, Jones, that one will have to go back to the Museum pretty sharpish in the mornin', but there's no reason not to keep this one. If we start messin' about with it now, we'll be up all night, so why don't we finish our supper and turn in? We can get a fresh crack at it after breakfast."

Jones woke suddenly. A life spent in wild or hostile places had sharpened his instinct to a fine edge, so that even after only one night, he had become accustomed to the sounds of this house. Something, therefore, wasn't right. There! A small sound, but definitely out of place.

Jones got out of bed, briefly considered getting his pistol, but decided against it. The British police weren't any too keen on firearms, despite the numbers legally held. He moved quietly to the door, then into the corridor. The sounds seemed to be coming from the floor below. Fortunately, everywhere was carpeted and there were no creaky steps of floorboards.

His eyes now adjusted to the dark, Jones spotted the intruder straight away. A dark mass huddled in front of the study door. There was a sound of scraping and clicking, and a muttered curse.

"Hey!" Jones shouted. "Stop right there!"

As he had expected, the man jumped up and charged him, with the clear intention of shoving him aside and making for the stairs and the way out. But Jones wasn't a man to be bulled aside like that, and a jiu-jitsu throw was sufficient to send the man on his back to the floor.

Then the light came on and Wimseys' voice said. "Capital work, Jones! You cottoned on to that quicker than my alarms did!"

Jones turned to see Lord Peter, in pyjamas and dressing gown, pistol in hand, grinning at him. The burglar lurched to his feet and began to run again. Jones stepped back to give Wimsey a clear shot, but it wasn't necessary. The intruder was brought up short by the sight of Bunter at the top of the staircase. Wimseys' manservant looked faintly ridiculous in a long nightshirt, but there was nothing comical about the revolver in his hand.

"That'll be enough of that, sunshine!" He stated in a tone very different from the polished accents of a 'gentlemans' gentleman'.

The burglars' shoulders slumped, then he raised his hands and turned to Wimsey.

"All right, guv'nor." He said in a gravelly tone. "It's a fair cop!"

He was a shortish, burly man in his thirties, with a heavy jaw, brown hair in a short cut and brown eyes that held a gleam of more than ordinary intelligence.

"Jack Stopes." Bunter said grimly. "I always knew you'd go to the bad! Last I heard, you were doing three in the Scrubs."

Stopes blinked, then shook his head. "Major Wimsey and Sergeant Bunter!" He growled. "If I'd known, Sarge, I wouldn't 'ave taken the job, being out on licence, an' all!"

"Wondered why you'd left the silver alone." Wimsey remarked. "Somebody asked you to do this?"

"Yes, sir." Stopes replied. "Gent paid me to break into this 'ouse and take something p'ticler. Got a drawin' in me pocket."

He reached down and Jones barked. "Careful, pal! Nice and slow!"

Stopes gave him a withering look. "I ain't carrying no weapons. Not even a cosh. That's for them as can't be bothered to do the job right.

"Here's the picture, and a note I was supposed to leave."

Jones stepped forward and took both items. The picture was a well-drawn sketch of the Cthulhu image. The note was in a plain white envelope addressed to "The Occupier".

Stopes shook his head again. "Blowed if I know what kind of lock you've got on that study, sir!" He commented. "Never came across one I couldn't pick inside five minutes before!"

"Right!" Wimsey said. "Well, no harm done, so let's not bother the constabulary, shall we? Make yourself scarce, Stopes! But if I can offer some advice, get yourself a job with a locksmith. They won't care about your record, except that it qualifies you for the job. Mention my name if you want.

"Now, skip!"

"Yessir!" Stopes said fervently, and was gone.

"What kind of crook does a job unarmed?" Jones wanted to know.

"One that don't want to hang." Wimsey told him. "You don't get much more than five years for burglary. If you cosh someone in the process, that'll add another two or three years. But if you carry a gun or a knife, then someone's liable to get killed, and that's the gallows!"

"If that will be all, your lordship, I'll make a round to see that everything is safe, then retire." Bunter said.

"Carry on, Sergeant." Said Wimsey absently. He was looking at the note he'd taken from Jones, now he handed it back. Jones read it.

 _To Whom it May Concern,_

 _This is to apologize for breaking into your home in this fashion. Only one item will have been taken, and no damage done, by my instructions._

 _Please understand that I do not undertake this step lightly, or for monetary gain. The object stolen has limited cash value, its importance is a different thing._

 _There is more at stake here than you realize, and though you are, of course, at liberty to call the police, I would ask you not to do so. At least not immediately._

 _You must understand that certain objects, while not intrinsically dangerous, can have connexions to things or persons who are. This image is one of those things. Please stay out of this matter, it will bring you no good, and may have grave consequences which will not be of my making._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Elijah Delapore_

"Plain paper and envelope -twopence at any post office. Handwriting and vocabulary of an educated American." Wimsey noted.

"How do you know he's American?" Jones asked.

Wimsey chuckled. "Only your lot spell 'apologise' and 'realise' with a 'z' instead of an 's'. Or 'connections' with an 'x', for that matter. Also, he signed off 'Sincerely'. An Englishman would have put 'Yours faithfully'.

"But that's something else for tomorrow. We both need our beauty sleep. You more than I, of course, old chap."

"Thanks, pal." Jones grinned back.

The messenger from the Museum arrived bright and early to repossess the image and the employee files. That done, Bunter was dispatched to a stationers to obtain some ink and a roller. It took some patience, but a perfect print was finally produced from the base of the plaster cast.

"That's a map of some kind." Jones stated. "An old one, too. It shows the hills and rivers, but no roads. Looks like there's some kind of settlement there and a couple of marks -crosses. Every map like this I ever saw, a cross marks something important."

"You'd know better than I." Wimsey allowed. "Shame there's no clue as to where it's a map of!"

"I think we already have that." Jones said. "Where's the map I took from Madames' house?"

Wimsey passed it over and Jones compared the two documents. "Figures." He said. "The map on the bottom of the statue matches the square somebody outlined on this modern one. See, the features are the same, only the roads are on this one."

"And the names." Wimsey added. "The settlement marked on the old map seems to be this village, Anchester. One of those crosses marks a place called Exham Priory, but there's nothing except some woodland where the other one is."

"What can we find out about this place?" Jones asked.

"Hmph! There's a railway station at the village." Wimsey noted. "What does Bradshaws' say?"

Jones had encountered this combination of Railway timetable and guidebook before, and soon located Anchester Halt.

"The village of Anchester," he read, "is the centre of a thriving rural community, untouched by modern industry, and though set in picturesque countryside holds little of interest to the ordinary visitor. Those with antiquarian interests, however, might have occasion to visit the fine Saxon church and see its collection of relics found on the site. These show continuous habitation of the area dating back beyond the Roman period as far as Neolithic or possibly Palaeolithic times.

"The only other point of interest are the ruins of Exham Priory, some three miles west of the village. The Priory was once the seat of the Barons de la Poer. Abandoned in the reign of James I, the house had for long been the focus of a cycle of particularly horrible folk legends. It remains of intense antiquarian interest due to its unusual mixture of architectural styles."

Jones looked up from the book. "That's all." He said. "Do you know these de la Poers?"

"Never heard of 'em." Wimsey said, already thumbing through another thick volume. "Which is odd. I mean, a barony is pretty low on the ladder, as these things go, but I should know the name, at least."

Some time later, he shook his head. "Nothin' in Burkes', or Debretts', or even _Who's Who_. Probably means the line's extinct. But that mention of horrid old tales makes me think of our friend Cthulhu and his pals, what?"

"I hear you." Jones agreed. "But how do we find out?"

"I'll need to make a telephone call." Wimsey said. "Then we'll have lunch, I think."

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alfred Coombes-Willoughby, KG, DSO, PhD, who rejoiced in the official title of Rouge Croix Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary, was an odd mix of academic and soldier. His willowy frame was held with a military erectness that made his well-worn tweed jacket look rather odd. Above the firm jaw and decided mouth – decorated with a neatly-trimmed moustache – a pair of mild hazel eyes peered benignly at them through half-moon spectacles.

"Major Wimsey," he said, "a pleasure to see you again, my boy! In distinguished company, too, if my friends at the University are to be believed. An honour to meet you, Dr Jones. So, what brings you to the College of Arms?"

"Lookin' for information, Sir Alfred." Wimsey answered. "The kind you can only find here. Came across a family name I don't recognise – de la Poer. They were Barons of Exham."

"Hmm." Sir Alfred pondered a moment. "Rings a bell. Give me a moment, gentlemen."

While they were along, Jones asked: "What are we doing here, Wimsey? I know about the College. The boss is the Earl Marshal and they're in charge of important ceremonies, right?"

"As far as it goes." Wimsey agreed. "But that's only one part of it. The College is the authority on arms and armorial bearin's for the whole Empire. If somebody thinks or believes they're entitled to a coat of arms, this is where they have to come. That means the College has to be able to verify the claim. So the Heralds and Pursuivants ain't just experts in ceremony and pageantry. They have to be historians and genealogists as well.

"This buildin' has one of the biggest and most complete genealogical libraries in the world. If there's anythin' to be found about the de la Poers, here's where we'll find it."

Sir Alfred returned sooner than expected, carrying a thick file. "Knew I'd heard that name recently!" He announced. "A job of Bluemantles' - one of the other Pursuivants – was about that family. Chap from America named Delapore claimed to be a descendant – apparently he's bought the Priory. Bluemantle did the research and it seems the fellow is in the direct line.

"What's your interest, Wimsey?"

"Well, Jones here is doin' a bit of research about that part of the country." Wimsey said smoothly. "Lots of old stuff there, Stone Age and what-have-you. I'd come by some old books on the subject, so he looked me up and I decided to come along on the job. Bit of a change, country air and all that.

"But the books I had also talked about the de la Poers, and not in good terms. Lots of ghost stories and so forth."

"Stories like that," Jones put in, "are often more about the place than the people. I mean, there's that legend of Lady Godiva you have. Most people talk about the wife of a Saxon Earl, who had that name. What they don't know is that before the Saxons came, the Celts who lived around there had a goddess called Goda. Celtic deities were big on horses, not so big on clothes. So whatever that Saxon lady did about the tax somehow got mixed up with the old religion and you get the whole naked horse ride thing."

"Just so." Wimsey continued. "So if you could give us a quick history of the family, it'd help us to sort the ancient stuff from the not-so-ancient."

"Quite." Sir Alfred nodded. "The actual history is quite sinister enough, however. Let me see...

"The Barony was created in 1261 when Henry III granted the land and title to Gilbert de la Poer, first Baron Exham. Hmm, the Priory itself had been at one time the home of a reclusive and ill-regarded monastic order, and had been built on a Roman Temple of Cybele, which in turn had been built over a Druid sanctuary – both cults were alleged to practise human sacrifice, you know.

"Anyway, Gilbert seems to have been a decent enough man of his kind, nothing out of the ordinary in his ancestry or reputation. He pulled the old priory down and built a fortified manor there. Seems that things went rapidly to the bad after that. There's a 1307 reference to a de la Poer as 'accursed of God', for instance. Then sometime in the 1400s, a Lady Mary de la Poer married the Earl of Shrewsfield, only to be murdered shortly thereafter by her husband and mother-in-law. Apparently the murderers confessed to a priest, and what they told him convinced him not only to absolve, but to bless them!

"Matters came to head during the reign of James I. Sometime in the early 1600s, Walter de la Poer, third son of the tenth Baron, was accused of killing his entire family, father, brothers and several servants. The estate reverted to the Crown, but Walter, now the eleventh Baron, faced no trial and was not even pursued as he left for Virginia.

"The de la Poer lands were granted to the Norrys family, Squires of Anchester. Walter started a family and a plantation in Virginia, and the family name eventually changed to Delapore. It seems that the Delapore plantation, Carfax, was destroyed by Union troops during your Civil War, Dr Jones, and the Delapores never returned there, electing after the war to move north and go into manufacturing with considerable success.

"That was how matters stood until the Great War. It seems that a young American pilot named Delapore became friendly with one of the Norrys family and rediscovered his ancestry, communicating it with some enthusiasm to his widowed father. Sufficient, at any rate, to induce the father to purchase the Priory in 1918. However, sadly the younger Delapore was shot down in the last days of the War and was an invalid for the remaining two years of his life.

"After his death, his father undertook the extensive restoration of the Priory. Work which I understand to be close to completion. He contacted the College late last year to ensure that his use of the de la Poer name and arms was legitimate, hence the research.

"Is that of any help, gentlemen?"

"Possibly, and thank you." Wimsey replied. "One last thing, though. This American chap, his Christian name wouldn't be Elijah, would it?"

Sir Alfred shook his head. "No, why do you ask?"

"Name turned up in some correspondence." Jones explained. "Must be a coincidence."

"So," Jones said later that evening over drinks. "we have a map on the bottom of an ancient image that matches the location of an ancient temple which happens to be the former home of an aristocratic family that went to the bad and were wiped out three hundred years ago, apart from some American descendants, one of whom is restoring the old house. Meanwhile another American with the same surname is desperately trying to get hold of the idol.

"Nothing make sense, here, Wimsey."

"Not at the moment, no." Wimsey allowed. "But I'd bet that if you could get a look at that old house, maybe the older parts that used to be the temple, you'd find out more."

"Maybe, maybe not." Jones opined. "Cybele, or the Magna Mater, is pretty well documented. She was an Earth-Goddess out of Anatolia whose cult spread into Greece and Rome. The Romans carried the cult all over their Empire, same as they did with Mithras. But while Mithras was all very respectable, the Magna Mater cult had a bit of an underside. Some of the rites – the secret ones – were described as 'unspeakable'."

"Human sacrifice?" Wimsey asked.

Jones shrugged. "That's an old, old tale, pal. Most religions got their start that way. That's why a lot of the old legends -Greek ones mostly – are about kings who get themselves killed, usually by a brother or other male relative, then get avenged by their sons. It's a seasonal myth, you sacrifice someone important to make the crops grow or the sun come back after the winter.

"Then there's the Druid thing. The Druids used to sacrifice a man – usually one of them – to carry messages to the Otherworld. If the two cults got mixed somehow..."

At that point Bunter entered. "Beg pardon, your Lordship, but there's a gentleman to see you..." He hesitated, with an air of unease.

"What's up, Bunter old man?" Wimsey enquired. "Speak up!"

"Well, sir," Bunter said dubiously, "I don't know if I've done right. You see, it's a coloured gentleman. I almost sent him round to the back, but his card says he's a Reverend, your Lordship, so I thought I'd better let him in at the front."

"Quite right too!" Wimsey told him, taking the card from the small salver Bunter held. "Can't send a padre round to the tradesmans' entrance, Bunter, never mind what colour he is!"

He looked at the card. "By Jove!" He exclaimed. "Things just got a lot more interestin', Jones. Our visitor is the Reverend Elijah Delapore, of Chicago, Illinois. Show him in, Bunter."

Elijah Delapore was a man in his sixties, tall and thin, but apparently hale. His beard and hair were grizzled, and his face lined and seamed with experience, but his eyes remained keen and alert.

"I'm sorry to intrude at so late an hour, Lord Wimsey," He apologised, "but I figured it wouldn't do for a black man to be seen knocking at your door in broad daylight. It would certainly be looked at askance in some parts of the States, but I'm not sure how things are over here."

"No trouble, I assure you, Padre." Wimsey told him. "This is my guest, a countryman of yours, Dr Indiana Jones. Do take a seat. Care for somethin' to drink? Whisky an' soda? Splendid! Another one, Jones? I will, too. Bunter, would you? Smoke if you like, Padre. Turkish in the mahogany box, Virginia in the ebony one, help yourself."

As soon as the demands of hospitality were met, Delapore plunged into his subject. "Mr Stopes tells me you read my note, Lord Wimsey. I want to apologize again for the events of last night, and to thank you for being so charitable to my employee."

Wimsey waved a hand dismissively. "Not the first time somethin' like this has happened." He replied. "You don't strike me as a desperate criminal, so I'm interested in why you took those kinds of steps."

"Well, to begin with, Lord Wimsey, I was not aware of your reputation." Delapore admitted. "I contacted Madame Zorova because of her knowledge of the occult community here, and thought she might be useful. She told me she could obtain the image of Cthulhu through one of her circle. I didn't know the methods she was using to do this, however. This mornings' newspapers opened my eyes.

"Then Stopes confided that you had been his commanding officer during the War, and I undertook some research. I had assumed that you were a rival collector, but it soon became apparent to me that you were either acting for the Museum, or on behalf of Madame Zorovas' catspaw.

"I reasoned that to place myself in competition with you would be pointless, but that an explanation of the whole affair might convince you to either leave the matter alone, or perhaps bring me an influential ally.

"Now that I find you are working with one of the most distinguished archaeologists of our generation, I find myself more hopeful of the latter.

"I see you have a copy of the image there, and the maps tell me you have found its secret, yes?"

Jones nodded. "Something to do with Exham Priory, right?"

"Not directly." Delapore answered. "But the impending occupation of the Priory by its new owner only renders my errand more urgent."

"Perhaps you'd better start at the beginning." Jones said. "what's your connection to the de la Poers?"

The old man shrugged. "I was born in the slave compound of the Delapore plantation in Virginia, a week before the Federal troops burned the house to the ground. After Emancipation, like many slaves, we rook the name of our former owners.

"My father had little hope that life would improve for us in the South, free or not, so he took the family north, to Chicago. There, though we were never considered equal to the whites, we at least did not face the same bitter hatred and systematic persecution visited on those who did remain. My father and brothers found work in the stockyards or on the docks. But I was of a studious disposition, which brought me to the attention of our pastor. He was kind enough to assist me in entering one of the few theological colleges willing to accept black students, and in due course I was ordained.

"Of course, I could only minister to my own people, but that was enough. Until I discovered that some of my parishioners were practising rituals of a distinctly non-Christian kind. That set me on a course of study on the occult, during which I became aware of the stories surrounding the ancestors of our former owners. I was fascinated, and delved deeper into the folklore of the area around Anchester, seeking a clue into the cause of the corruption."

"I take it you found somethin'." Wimsey said.

"I did." Delapore allowed. "Though I am not sure what. There is a great deal of myth in the story, but like so many myths, there may be a kernel of truth.

"The myths tell of Great Cthulhu and his people, who came to Earth from space millions of years ago, built their cities, and made war on the star-headed Elder Things of Antarctica. Then, as a result of some catastrophe, Cthulhu and his people were trapped in suspended animation in their sunken city of R'Lyeh.

"Millennia later, another war was fought on Earth, between two races not native to the world. Some call it the War Between Heaven and Hell. The war threatened the extinction of the newly-evolved human race, so another force stepped in - some call them the Charred Council – and put a stop to the war by sealing the portals though which the opposing forces came to Earth.

"But there were others who did not want the portals sealed. The Old Ones, the _Necronomicon_ calls them. Cthulhu was their High Priest and cousin, and they did not wish to be cut off from him. So they sent their soul and messenger, Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, to raise R'Lyeh before its time and release Cthulhu so that he could lead his people and the Deep Ones to destroy humanity or convert them to worship of the Old Ones.

"In turn, the Charred Council sent four terrible Riders to prevent this. R'lyeh was raised and Cthulhu released before the Riders arrived. In the ensuing battle, the Riders called Strife and Fury slaughtered hundreds of the Deep Ones. The one called Death climbed to the topmost tower of R'Lyeh and confronted Nyarlathotep, driving him back to his own realm. But the youngest of the riders, named War, duelled Cthulhu himself and drove him back into his temple. In doing so, he severed one of Cthulhus' claws.

"R'lyeh sank again, and though Cthulhu grew a new claw to replace the lost one, the severed one lay where it had fallen, until certain of the Deep Ones ventured into the city and fetched it away. It is said that they gave it in tribute to a sorceror of Lemuria, and that since then it has passed from hand to hand, cult to cult, until finally the cult of Cthulhu regained it and concealed it in "the Island of the Mighty", carving its location into one of their images, so that it can be retrieved when R'Lyeh rises again."

"Um, the Island of the Mighty is what the Celts used to call Britain." Wimsey noted.

"True, but this is all pretty thin." Jones said. "Though the map on the idol goes a long way toward supporting it."

"There is more." Delapore said. "Some Egyptian records speak of an item, supposedly a fang of the serpent Apophis, that belonged to the High Priest Im-ho-tep, who murdered a Pharaoh and was mummified alive for his crimes. Some of Im-ho-teps' acolytes escaped with it and supposedly used it in their rituals. When Alexander conquered Egypt, he found the thing and sent it back to Macedon, where his mother incorporated it into her own dark cult.

"Later still, it was taken to Rome and became the centre of a cult so notorious that the Emperor Augustus suppressed it. The survivors are said to have taken all their sacred items with them when they fled 'beyond the Western edge of the Empire'. Britain wasn't part of the Empire until later, so if the Fang of Apophis and the Claw of Cthulhu are the same thing, it makes sense.

"But the point, gentlemen, is not whether or not the Claw exists, but that the Cult of Cthulhu believe that it does, and that it is concealed near Exham Priory. You see, the Cult believe that the time of Cthulhus' return is soon, and they will wish to retrieve this Claw. The cultists are drawn from among the most degraded and savage dregs of humanity. They will stop at nothing to regain whatever this item is.

"If we can forestall them. Take the Claw, which may well be the tusk of some extinct elephant, or the horn of an Ice Age rhinoceros, and bring it into the light of day, then they will be powerless. But if we do not, and they come to Anchester, or the Priory, there will be bloodshed.

"And should the new owner allow archaeologists to explore the area, the cult will act with greater speed and ferocity."

"But you're saying that the three of us can slip in, grab whatever it is and bring it back to London as a legitimate archaeological find, before the cult finds out about us?" Jones asked.

Delapore nodded. "They will be watching the Priory, the new owner and the workmen. But if we can slip into the area unnoticed, find what we need to find, and leave quietly, we have a chance."

Wimsey showed him the map. "This second cross, in the woodlands near the Priory. Mean anythin' to you?"

Delapore frowned. "It could be another entrance. But to what?"

"The area is only a few miles from the coast, close to Romney Marsh." Wimsey noted. "That part of England is riddled with caves and tunnels -a lot of it used to be coastal or actually under the sea before it was reclaimed and the water must have worn 'em through, washed away the softer rocks and earth. Over the years, people have expanded them and dug new ones. It used to be a big smugglin' area at one time, and the 'gentlemen' used to use 'em for escape and storage."

"That far inland?" Jones asked.

Wimsey nodded. "It's possible. Lot of that area is limestone, ideal for caves an' tunnels. Could be the ones the smugglers dug joined up with a bigger natural system. They'd have used 'em because the further they could get inland before they had to bring the stuff up, the easier to avoid the Revenue men.

"I'll tell you what, Padre, you go back now to wherever you're staying and get some sleep. Then get your traps together and come here for lunch tomorrow. By that time, Jones and I will have a plan."


	4. Chapter 4

**The Claw of Cthulhu**

 **Chapter Four: The Underground River**

"It won't do," Wimsey told his colleagues over lunch, "to go bustlin' up to Anchester and start pokin' around. If these cult chaps are about, they're bound to notice new folk arrivin' an' takin' an interest. So we have to outflank 'em."

"The Priory itself is off-limits." Jones went on. "Apart from being private property, the restoration work will probably have blocked off access to the underground parts. So that leaves the woods. It's not a big area, and I know what I'll be looking for, so it shouldn't be too hard to find an entrance there, if there is one."

"But how do we actually get there?" Delapore asked.

"That's the clever part, Padre." Wimsey told him. "In an hour or so, we'll all pile into my car and motor down to Dymchurch-Under-the-Wall on Romney Marsh. I've already booked us rooms there for the night. Then bright an' early in the mornin', we'll leave there an' drive up to a pub about five miles outside Anchester. They don't have rooms there, but the landlord will let us leave the car in his yard for a quid – he does that for walkin' parties – an' his wife will put us up some sandwiches an' a flask of tea.

"It's only about two miles from there to the copse we're interested in, so we should be there by nine in the mornin'."

"I just hope," Delapore said, "that this hotel will let me stay there. It was easier to find one in London than it would have been back home, but in the country?"

"We'll be stayin' at the Ship Inn." Wimsey told him. "I've spoken to the landlord and he doesn't care what anyone is as long as they're not German!

"Now I've never done any potholin', but I've run up and down the odd Alp, so I've got some climbin' gear. Ropes an' pitons an' suchlike. Hope it'll do."

"Done my share of spelunking," Jones put in, "and the gear is pretty much the same. We'll need lights, though."

"Got some electric torches -big ones – and plenty of batteries." Wimesy told him. "Which leaves one more thing. Come into the study."

In the study, Wimsey produced a set of keys and unlocked a large, sturdy cabinet Jones had not seen opened before. As the doors swung open, he saw an array of gleaming barrels and polished stocks.

"We don't know how far the cult fellows might have got, or how much they know." Wimsey said. "But accordin' to the Padre here, they're a pretty unpleasant bunch, an' I don't like the idea of meetin' any of 'em without an argument to hand, so to speak.

"Now I've got me automatic, an' Jones has his revolver. I suppose you're not armed, Padre?"

"As a matter of fact, I do carry a Derringer." Delapore admitted, producing the little pistol from his hip pocket. "My ministry takes me into some parts of town that aren't always safe. The Lord, of course, has a lot on His plate and sometimes His ministers have to look after themselves!"

"Practical view." Jones commended, then said to Wimsey. "I'm pretty handy with a rifle. You got a Winchester there?"

"Sadly not." Wimsey admitted. "But I do have this Holland & Holland .416 bolt action magazine rifle. Give it a try?"

Jones felt the balance and tried the action a few times. "Nice." He said. "Never realised the British could make guns this good!"

"We try." Wimsey allowed. "What about you, Padre?"

"I'm no hand with a rifle," Delapore admitted, "but I can handle a shotgun."

"Ah!" Wimsey said. "Here we are, then. Purdey 12-bore, just the ticket!

"As for me, I'll take the elephant gun. Nothin' like a .577 Nitro Express to discourage the opposition. In the trenches, Jerry used to send his snipers out behind steel plates. We used to use these fellows to punch holes in 'em an' snipe the snipers."

The Ship Inn at Dymchurch-under-the-Wall was almost the image of the Old English coaching inn, from the outside. On the inside, generations of landlords had carefully preserved the appearance and atmosphere of the place while managing to install the creature comforts expected by modern travellers. The landlord was an almost Dickensian figure, from the buff waistcoat and heavy watch chain that stretched across his generous paunch, to his ruddy face, bald head and formidable whiskers.

Nevertheless he was brisk and efficient in showing them to the three comfortable rooms he had assigned them. "You're lucky it's so early in the year, gentlemen." He told them. "Things don't get busy until Whitsun, so you get a room each rather than having to double up. Dinner in half an hour?"

Dinner proved to be an excellent roast saddle of mutton, with local vegetables. Wimsey, though a connoisseur of wines, allowed himself to be persuaded by the landlord to accompany the dinner with the local ale, which was exceptional.

"I'm surprised you're drinking, Reverend." Jones noted. "Isn't your church one of the dry ones?"

Delapore shook his head. "I'm a Lutheran." He explained. "Mind you, we're all dry now!"

"Why do you think I travel so much?" Jones quipped.

"Dashed silly, this Prohibition thing." Wimsey noted. "You can keep the stuff at home, privately, an' all the rich folk stockpiled drink before the law was passed. It only affects the ordinary people, and they just buy it from bootleggers. All they've done is to turn ordinary decent folk into law-breakers."

"You're right, Lord Wimsey." Delapore agreed. "You can persuade folk to behave well, but the minute you try to force them, they resist. I wonder what my colleague over there would've made of it all?"

He gestured to a portrait that hung above the fireplace. It showed a tall, slender man in the garb of an 18th Century clergyman, holding a Bible and gazing benevolently out of the frame.

"He'd have thought it uncommon funny, sir." This was the landlord, who had approached quietly to see if all was well with the meal. "That there is the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, who was once Vicar hereabouts, and made Dean of the Peculiers on Romney Marsh."

"So why would he have found Prohibition funny?" Jones asked.

"Well, sir," the landlord began, seating himself at Wimseys' gesture and signalling the barmaid for more ale, "back in them days, the Government charged an awful big duty on brandy and tobacco, which people didn't take to. So in places like this, near to France, there was an awful lot of smuggling went on.

"Now Dr Syn, he'd been at Cambridge with the Squires' son, and they was good friends. So Syn came here and became the Vicar. But then his wife ran off with another man, and he upped and disappeared after them. Then years later, he washed up on the shore here again after a shipwreck and went back to being Vicar again, t'other one having died trying to rescue survivors from the wreck.

"Well, about that time, the worst of all the smuggling gangs got started up. The Night Riders they called themselves, and they'd ride the Marsh in ragged clothes, wearing masks all painted with phosphorous, to scare the locals and protect the smuggled goods. Their leader was called the Scarecrow, and they said he was a ghost or the Devil himself, riding a great black horse he called Gehenna.

"This went on for years, and they sent Revenue men and dragoons and spies and even Bow Street Runners after the Scarecrow, but he beat them all. Then a Captain Collyer came, set to smash the smugglers. He had a mulatto with him, who couldn't speak but could find hidden brandy a mile off. This mulatto had been rescued by Collyer after being marooned by a pirate called Clegg..."

"Clegg?" Jones interrupted. " _Nathaniel_ Clegg? There are people in the Caribbean still looking for his treasure! When you talk about pirates, there's Morgan, Blackbeard, Peter Blood, Barbosa, Jack Sparrow, Flint and Clegg!"

"Just so." The landlord agreed. "But what the mulatto knew, and what Collyer soon found out, was that Dr Syn and Clegg the pirate were the same man! Well, Syn tried to get away. He dodged Collyer, but the mulatto found him and killed him with his own harpoon before he disappeared himself. In the mess afterwards, it came out that Syn had also been the Scarecrow! Captain Collyer should've had the body hanged in chains, but instead he buried Syn at sea, as a Captain should be."

"An' I suppose," Wimsey drawled, "that on dark, stormy nights, you can still hear the Scarecrow ride across the Marsh on his great black horse, what?"

"Bless you, no, sir!" The landlord chuckled. "Dark, stormy nights are no use to a smuggler. But when the moon's full, and the tide's high, if you hear three hoots of an owl and three cries of a curlew, then you stay indoors!"

They all laughed. Coffee and brandy came next. "I've paid the duty on this, your Lordship. Honest!" The landlord promised.

Despite a convivial evening, the oddly-assorted trio were up betimes the following morning. So much so that it was still fifteen minutes shy of nine o'clock as they approached the copse marked on the map.

"You can always tell a British woodland." Jones said. "There's something orderly about it."

"Of course." Wimsey told him. "Most woodland in Britain has been continuously coppiced for centuries. Cut back here, left to grow there, in rotation dependin' on the kind of wood that grows there and what you use it for. It still happens on the big estates like Dukes' Denver or Downton, but it's startin' to fall off in other places now that most people live in the towns."

"There seems to be some sort of rise in the middle there." Delapore noted. "Perhaps we should head for that?"

Half an hours' brisk walk brought them to the foot of the mound. Another ten was spent in circling it.

"Well, despite the trees growing up and over it, this is no natural hill." Jones told them. "Too perfectly circular, too even, and the trees get smaller as they climb the sides. This, gentlemen, is what they call a tumulus or barrow. There's some kind of tomb under there, I'd put money on it!"

"How old?" Wimsey asked.

Jones shrugged. "To be this overgrown? Bronze Age at least. More likely Neolithic or maybe even older."

"You think this might be where the Claw is hidden?" Delapore asked.

"If it is, we'll have to come back with some excavation gear." Jones replied. "The climbing tools we've got won't get us into there." He frowned. "This isn't right. I need a minute."

He sat down on a nearby tree-stump and took out the map again. The other two also sat down. Delapore fumbled in his knapsack. "I noticed you slipped a candy bar or two into here." He said to Wimsey. "How'd you know I have a sweet tooth?"

"That's not any old candy." Wimsey told him.

Delapore examined the wrapper. "Quiggins' Kendal Mint Cake." He read. "Never heard of it."

"Marvellous stuff!" Wimsey said enthusiastically. "Took a couple of bars up Mont Blanc with me. The Matterhorn, too. Gives you a pick up when you can't stop to eat properly."

Delapore broke off a small piece of the white confection and popped it into his mouth. He nodded his approval.

"Save some for later!" Wimsey warned.

"Got it!" Jones said. "This map is more precise than it looks. This barrow isn't the spot we want. We need to be about half a mile further east."

That brought them to an unexpected clearing. The trees stopped abruptly at the edge of it, with not even a sapling beyond. The glade itself was carpeted with thick, rather over-lush, grass, but oddly, there were no wildflowers growing in it. Delapore and Wimsey began to move around the edges, but Jones made straight for the centre. Just before he reached it, he stumbled.

"What the?" He said, then dropped to his knees and began to prod in the grass with his knife. There was a sudden clinking sound. "Gotcha!" Jones exulted. "Give me a hand, here?"

A layer of turf and moss had to be pulled and scraped away. It would have been a strange sight for any passer-by. Wimsey in sturdy tweed and corduroy, the image of a gentleman on a climbing holiday. Delapore, who was of a size with Wimsey, in the same. Jones, shorter but more ruggedly-built than the other two, in heavy twill trousers, leather jacket and a battered old hat. All three industriously digging away.

What they uncovered proved to be a circular stone slab, some five feet in diameter and clearly man-made. There was a bronze ring set into the edge at one point. The centre was dominated by a worn carving of what appeared to be a female figure, and there was more carving around the edge.

"Looks like writin', what?" Wimsey said.

"Celtic _ogham_." Jones said. "Which makes these carvings no older than the First Century. The stone itself and the image in the centre are much older, if I'm any judge. Even these are so worn that I can only make out the odd word. I can see 'womb', 'water', something about 'earth' and the names 'Danu' and 'Rhiannon'. Those are Irish and Welsh names for Mother-goddesses, which connects to Cybele and the Magna Mater. This whole area must once have been sacred to the Great Mother.

"No mention of Cthulhu, though."

Delapore shook his head. "The Cthulhu Cult is supposed to predate the cult of the Mother by millennia. It's supposed to predate humanity, as we know it. Cultists believe that our half-ape ancestors were the first to worship Cthulhu and the Old Ones."

"Looks like this ring is supposed to hinge up." Jones said. "There's a tin of grease in my pack, pass it over."

"You always carry grease around?" Delapore asked.

Jones chuckled. "In my line of work, you come across a lot of rusty locks and handles, Reverend!"

The ring was reluctant, but did eventually hinge up. It was large enough for two men to grasp and pull, so Wimsey and Jones set to. Both were powerful men, but the slab had not moved in centuries, so they knew the job was not going to be an easy one. Delapore, though no longer young, still had a certain wiry strength about him, and he circled the edge of the slab, looking for movement and digging away grass and earth with one of the mountaineering axes they had brought. It soon became apparent that the slab pivoted in the middle, but that the pivots were corroded and stiff. Nevertheless after close on an hour of pulling, pushing, levering and not a little swearing, they got it fully open.

The slab proved to be the cap of a well-like structure, lined with undressed but closely-fitted stones that, according to Jones, predated the slab by some centuries. Crude hand and foot holds had been hacked into the stone at some remote period to facilitate descent, and the beam of one of the powerful electric torches showed a rough stone floor some thirty feet down.

Jones and Wimsey hammered pitons into the tiny gaps between the stones to set up a safety line, then the Reverend tossed a coin, on the result of which Jones climbed down the shaft while Wimsey paid out the rope. The descent was not a long one, and at Jones' signal, Wimsey pulled the rope back up and Delapore made the descent, before Wimsey rearranged the line so that Jones could belay him from the bottom of the shaft.

From there, the three men made their way along a wide tunnel, clad in the same undressed stone as the shaft, which headed in the direction of Exham Priory and had a steep but manageable downward incline. After a while, Jones called a halt.

"Do you hear that?" He asked the others.

Both men nodded. "Water." Wimsey said. "Flowing fast, somewhere ahead."

"We need to be careful." Delapore warned. "I don't reckon any of us needs an unexpected swim!"

Some time later, the tunnel opened out into a much larger space. In the light of their torches, they could see that this chamber was lined and flagged with dressed stone of a much more recent date than the tunnel.

"Roman." Jones decided. "But not that altar!"

The altar in question stood in the centre of the chamber and bore a life-size female image. The image was crudely-carved, squatting, obese and heavy-breasted, with blank eyes, mouth and womb both gaping open.

"The dark aspect of the Mother." Jones told them. "Ever-hungry, always giving birth. Feed her, and she gives fertility. Starve her, and she produces monsters."

"Delightful." Wimsey murmured. "Somethin's been burned on that altar. Lots of stuff. Look how the stones are blackened! An' I don't like the look of those stains on the floor in front of it, either!"

Further exploration found six long pits in the floor, blackened like the stones on the altar, with the corroded remains of bronze supports at each end.

"Fire-pits." Jones said. "Those supports would've held spits for roasting the sacrifices for the feast."

Then Delapore, who had been exploring the outer walls, gave a cry of disgust that caught their attention. Joining him, they found a series of Roman mosaics laid into the walls. Sealed away from the outer air, undisturbed for centuries, they were almost as clear and bight as the day they were made.

What they depicted, however, was grim indeed. Jones recognised it at once, as did Wimsey from his schoolboy reading of Homer. The traditional Graeco-Roman sacrificial feast. Here were the victims being led to the altar, where priests cut their throats, catching the blood in silver bowls and pouring it over the image of the Goddess. There were the thigh-bones, wrapped in fat, being burned on the altar. Then the ceremonial tasting of the entrails, followed by the butchering and roasting of the victims for the feast proper. But the true horror lay in the nature of the victims.

"They're human!" Delapore said. "Human sacrifice. Cannibalism. My God! Was this the de la Poer secret? Was this why Walter killed his family and fled to Virginia?"

"It's possible." Jones allowed. "Cannibalism is as old as humanity, and people only do it for two reasons -starvation or ritual. Ritual cannibalism still happens in parts of Africa, South America and the South Seas today. It's quite possible that this cult survived in Britain until the 17th Century. After all, it was only a few years before James VI of Scotland came to the English throne as James I that he's supposed to have hunted down and captured Sawney Bean and his cannibal clan.

"But this is kinda weird. This temple is definitely Roman, even though the altar itself and the passage here are much older. The ritual follows Greek and Roman patterns, and the high priest there is obviously Roman. But look at the other two priests. If I've got it right, one of them is Phrygian, and the other looks like some kind of Druid.

"Now the priests of Cybele were all Phrygian, and the Magna Mater cult was Roman. Suppose they came here and found a local cult with the same practices? Joining local religions with their own was a well-known Roman trick -hearts and minds, you know? Which could be why the worshippers here look like a mix of Romans and Celts.

"Some rich Roman probably came out here, found this cult, joined it, took over and built a new temple where the Priory now is. Explains why there's no ritual equipment, knives or chalices, left here. They took all the moveable stuff with them when they stopped using this place."

They had been exploring the walls as they spoke, but found nothing else except a single stone tablet, deeply carved in the Roman style with a Latin inscription which Wimsey effortlessly translated.

"I, Marcus Gracchus Antoninus, built – no, _re_ built -this temple of the Great Mother in the Fourth Year of the Emperor Domitian."

"Around 85 AD, then." Jones said. "This part of Britain was pretty much Roman by that time."

"I thought Julius Caesar conquered Britain in 55 BC?" Delapore remarked.

Wimsey shook his head. "No, old Julius led an invasion an' set up a client kingdom in the South East, but the real conquest was started by Claudius around 43 AD. Took decades to subjugate the whole country, an' they never got into Scotland."

"That's why they built the Wall." Jones added. "Is it me, or is the water getting louder?"

It was, and as they followed the sound, they came upon an archway, through which the rushing, roaring sound came clearly. The capstone of the archway was carved into another female figure, similar to, but subtly different from the one on the altar.

"Looks more than half like a frog!" Wimsey said. "What is she? Some sea-goin' equivalent of the lady on the altar?"

"Actually, that's about right." Jones told him, eyeing the image with its bulging eyes, too-wide mouth and webbed, over-large hands and feet. "I've seen an image like that in the Museum of the Miskatonic in Arkham. It was brought out of Innsmouth by a member of the Marsh family. He called it 'Mother Hydra' and said she was the wife of Father Dagon. Apparently there's an Esoteric Order of Dagon active in Innsmouth. They and the Marsh family keep trying to get the image back, but since they can't prove ownership -or rather that they came by it legally -the museum won't let it go.

"Dagon was a sea-god who was once worshipped in Phoenicia and all along the Mediterranean coasts. The Greeks identified him with Triton or Poseidon, the Romans with Neptune. But we found images like this one and a male figure of the same type on some of the islands the Deep Ones were supposed to have visited. The locals wouldn't name them, but said they were the enemies of the sea-goddess Namaka and the ocean god Kanaloa."

They ventured through the arch and came upon something quite unexpected. A wide, fast-flowing underground river that rushed and roared though the large cave. The dark waters came in via a low tunnel at one side, but exited through a much larger one.

Even more remarkable, however, was the ancient stone jetty that had been built out into it. A jetty onto which perhaps half-a-dozen long, narrow, high-prowed boats had been lifted.

"What the Hell?" Jones said. "The jetty is Roman, no mistake about that. But those boats should have rotted to nothing centuries ago. Nobody's been down here since the Priory was built, I'd bet on it!"

"Maybe there's a passage to here from the Priory?" Delapore hazarded.

"Even so," Jones said, "that place has been abandoned since the 17th Century. There's no way these boats could have lasted that long!"

They examined the boats carefully. Each one was big enough to hold three, maybe four men. The seemed to be built from a kind of light grey wood which none of the three could identify. When tested with a knife, the wood was found to be as hard as iron, but the boats were light enough to be easily lifted by two men. Near the prow of each one, something had been inlaid in a kind of silvery metal.

"Looks like writing." Delapore said. "Jones?"

The archaeologist shook his head. "No clue." He said. "It's some kind of cursive script, which is unusual if these boats are as old as I think they are. But I can't read it. I've never seen it before."

"I have." Wimsey said unexpectedly. "In the Isle of Man. Went there on holiday before the War, lookin' for old books. There's some ruins, no more than a few bits of old stone in the middle of a wood. A couple of the stones have carvin's on 'em like that. The antiquarians say it's just decoration, but the locals say it's the language of the Fair Folk."

"Fair Folk?" Delapore asked.

"Fairies or Elves." Jones told him. "You don't think these are Elvish boats, do you, Wimsey?"

Wimsey laughed. "Considerin' what we're mixed up in, old chap, I'm past rulin' anythin' out!"

That made them all laugh, then Jones said. "Well, we either go back or forward, and that river is the way forward. Want to see if these things will still float?"

"There's poles in 'em." Wimsey noted. "Be like puntin' on the Cam."

"Or riding a gondola in Venice." Jones said.

"If you must," Wimsey allowed, "but you can do the singin'!"

In the calmer water around the jetty, it was simple enough to get themselves and their gear into the boat. Once they had poled out into the middle, however, matters became different! The swift current seized the boat and sent it hurtling into the large tunnel at high speed.

It soon became apparent that the poles were not needed for propulsion. Made from the same light but unbreakable wood as the boats, they were meant for keeping the boat away from mid-stream rocks or from the walls of the tunnel when it twisted and turned. After a few near misses, they stationed Delapore in the bow, holding two of their torches. The combined beams illuminated the tunnel far enough ahead for the two younger men to be ready.

"How did they manage this in the old days?" Jones yelled over the rushing water.

"Shudder to think!" Wimsey replied. "Maybe some of 'em could see in the dark?"

Then Delapore yelled. "Hang on!"

Everyone ducked down as the boat suddenly picked up speed and shot over the edge of the cataract Delapore had spotted. It was going so fast that it was actually airborne for a few seconds, before dropping some twenty feet into the pool at the bottom. For a moment, they were sure of drowning, but the ancient vessel bobbed up like a cork, leaving them soaked, but afloat!

"Geez!" Jones spluttered. "We hardly even took on any water!"

"Is that going to happen again?" Delapore asked. "'Cause if it is, I want my fare back!"

Fortunately, the river broadened out at this point, and the journey became more sedate. After a few more miles, Delapore switched off the torches, as it was clear that the caves were becoming more light.

"Not phosphorescence," Jones noted, "filtered sunlight. There must be fissures in the rock up above."

Then the river opened into a large pool in the centre of a broad cavern perhaps three times the height of a man. There was clearly no going further by boat, as the river seemed to plunge deeper underground at the far edge of the pool.

There was only one available landing space in the cavern, and the pool was sufficiently shallow for them to pole the craft toward it. They noted several more boats like theirs drawn up on a narrow beach.

"How d'you think they got them back to the other cave?" Wimsey wondered. "Couldn't pole or row 'em back against that current!"

"Probably another tunnel we didn't find." Jones said. "Maybe it collapsed. Maybe the cult at the Priory stopped using this place and blocked it off. These boats are light enough for easy portage."

The beach they had landed on was narrow, and behind it was a steep incline. The cavern at this point narrowed from either side to form a funnel-like shape leading to a gaping opening at the top of the rise. The numerous large stalactites and stalagmites that dotted the area gave the place an unpleasant aspect. As if the cave were the fanged maw of some unthinkable beast, and the opening at the back its throat.

As they climbed, the three men became aware of a light coming through the opening. An unhealthy-looking green-white glow. Then Jones stopped and sniffed the air.

"Am I getting delirious from hunger," he asked, "or does anyone else smell fish?"

"Have some Mint Cake," Wimsey told him, "but yes, I'm getting a distinct whiff of Billingsgate."

"Me too." Delapore added. "Are we getting close to the sea?"

"Possible." Jones said. "Probable, actually. But I don't smell salt, just fish."

They advanced again, only to stop a few yards short of the opening. Now they heard sounds coming from it. Where before they had heard nothing now, by some trick of acoustics, the sound of voices could be heard.

It seemed to be some kind of ritual. A guttural, croaking voice was chanting in an unknown language. Every so often, it would pause and chorus of other voices, some like itself, others more ordinary, would chant a response: " _Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_ "

It was Delapore who translated. "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." His face was grim. "It seems we may be too late, gentlemen!"

"Let's go an' see." Wimsey said, uncasing his elephant gun and loading one of the heavy cartridges. "By the sound of it, there can't be more than a couple of dozen of 'em."

The others armed themselves. "I don't think they're expecting to be interrupted." Jones noted. "Or they'd have set sentries on that opening. We'll have the advantage of surprise, at least. If they're not armed, we may just be able to scare them off."

Together, they advanced toward the opening.


	5. Chapter 5

**The Claw of Cthulhu**

 **Chapter Five: Temple of the Claw**

The three men emerged onto a rocky slope that looked down into a kind of natural amphitheatre. The slope itself was too rugged to climb easily, but in some immemorial time a winding path, interspersed with flights of steps, had been cut into and across it, between waist-high walls of raw stone. A little above their heads was a flat roof, covered with a fungal, mossy growth that glowed with a sick green phosphorescence. This grew down the walls and would have lit the whole cave in a twilight fashion, had it not been overpowered by a circle of powerful electric lamps set on the sandy floor of the amphitheatre. The entire place reeked of fish, but that was not what brought the investigators close to nausea.

There, on the sandy floor, close to the back wall, stood a crude altar on which was placed an all-too-familiar image. Great Cthulhu, squatting in sleep on his cubical throne. In contrast to the altar, the image was a work of great skill and artistry, sculpted in some kind of green marble. But again, the idol was not the true source of horror here.

Gathered in a ring before the altar, performing a strange, hopping, leaping dance, were perhaps fifteen or twenty men and women, all quite naked. They seemed to be of several different races, judging by skin colour, and all of them seemed to be deformed or deficient in some way. They ranged from the obese to the skeletal, many had missing limbs, or bore terrible scars. Even the most ordinary-looking of them were covered with grotesque, even obscene, tattoos. They danced wildly, occasionally emitting ululating cries that had nothing of humanity in them. They were blank-eyed and slack-jawed, whether from drugs, ecstasy or idiocy it was impossible to tell.

Among them danced an equal number of beings that were not remotely human, except in general shape. Flabby things with slick, pale, green-tinged skins and large, webbed hands and feet. Their faces lacked both chins and foreheads, being mostly bulging, glassy eyes and wide, gaping mouths. The dance, with its crouching, hopping and leaping motions seemed to be better adapted for them than for humans, but the cries they uttered were more akin to articulate croaking. Some of the humans, Jones noted with a chill, had features too closely akin to the fish-frog horrors for comfort.

One of these unhuman creatures stood before the altar. It was far larger than the others, maybe ten feet tall and grossly corpulent. The motions it made and the sounds it uttered were more complex than the others. There was less of mindless ecstasy here, more of deliberate intelligence and purpose. Clearly this was some kind of high priest.

Then in part of its ritual, it moved a little to one side, and Delapore almost let out a cry. There, on the altar, lay a singular object. Some six feet long, it gleamed pale white in the electric lights. From about a foot in diameter it tapered along its gently-curved length to a needle point. For most of its length, the inside of the curve narrowed to a keen edge.

Delapore pulled the other two down out of sight and spoke in a low, urgent tone.

"That must be the Claw of Cthulhu!" He said. "The people there are cultists, all right. Hopeless, broken, near-idiots. Normal people don't join that cult. But what those _others_ are..."

"Deep Ones." Jones said. "I never believed they were real. How could I? How could anyone who hadn't seen... I spoke to you about them, Wimsey. The sea-creatures who come to islands and offer gold and jewels and good fishing to the natives in exchange for the chance to mate with humans."

"I remember." Wimsey replied grimly. "But we can wonder about all this later. Right now, if the Padres' right, we need to get that claw thing off 'em before they decide it gives 'em the right to do some mischief."

Jones nodded. "None of them seem to be armed, or even dressed. They also don't seem like they'd be able to fight well. The Deep Ones may be effective in the water, but I don't think they're built for action on land.

"I reckon a few well-placed shots would have them running for it. We probably only have to fire into the air."

"You're probably right." Wimsey replied. "But these are fanatics, not predictable, and I don't like the look of that big fellow at the altar one little bit.

"So, Padre, you take that twelve-bore along the path a little way an' hold the top of that first flight of steps. Jones, you an' I will try to put a scare into these chaps. If that doesn't work, we've got superior arms an' position, so we can make short work of any that show fight.

"Even if they do have some firearms, it won't be easy to come at us up here."

As soon as Delapore was in position, Wimsey and Jones rose above the parapet to begin. Unfortunately, the giant Deep One was now facing out over his congregation. Whether it was to give a blessing or a command they didn't know, nor did it matter, since the brute saw the men immediately, pointed to them and issued a string of croaks that could only be commands.

The worshippers turned as one and there was a babble of shrieks, yells, croaking that was suddenly overridden by the crash of Wimseys' elephant gun. Jones had heard American veterans speak of the unflappable nature of their British allies. Himself a man of iron nerve, he doubted that he could have shot straight in the circumstances. But Wimseys' aim was unerring, and the heavy .577 slug struck the high priest squarely between the eyes, shattering his skull in a mess of red and grey.

This caused two separate and distinct reactions among the worshippers. The humans, perhaps with a better understanding of what they were facing, fled with yells of panic, disappearing from sight under a beetling ledge at one side of the cave. The Deep Ones reacted with rage. So much so that most of them ignored the path and began scrambling up the rough slope toward the assassin.

The froglike creatures were not the worlds' greatest climbers, and Jones took full advantage of that fact. There were five rounds in his magazine, and he wasted none of them. This led to a cooling of ardour and greater caution in the remaining attackers.

Two of them, however, had decided to take the path, and thus arrived much sooner at the top, to be met by Delapore and his shotgun. At close range, a twelve-bore buckshot charge is messily lethal, and the elderly pastor calmly disposed of his assailants with one barrel each, before quickly reloading.

The noise of this brought the leader of the remaining Deep Ones upright from where he had been crouching. That brought him into Wimseys' sights. This time the massive impact of the bullet sent the creature flying off the slope to land beside the dead high priest.

At that point the surviving Deep Ones clearly thought better of things and retreated precipitately, making their way to a pool behind the altar and diving in to vanish immediately.

"C'mon!" Jones barked. "Let's get down there before they come back with reinforcements!"

They reached the floor and found that the Claw was simply laid on the altar, not secured in any way. Quickly, they rolled in in the emergency blankets Wimsey had insisted they bring, and began to look for a way out.

"The cultists went this way." Jones said. "There! That's where they got out!"

It was a low, narrow tunnel entrance concealed under a ledge. The scuffed up sand around the entrance gave evidence of the panicked exit of the cultists.

"They've had plenty of time to get clear." Jones said. "Let's get out of here..."

It was the overwhelming fishy stench that warned them. Wimsey twisted away as a webbed, clawed hand slashed at his jacket, ripping the tough tweed but missing the shirt underneath.

The Deep One was wickedly fast with its claw-strikes, but its hunched posture and hopping gait made for poor foot-work on land. Wimsey was skilled in jiu-jitsu, but was sure that attempting to grapple the creature, with its wet and slippery skin, would be a recipe for disaster. However, he was also an expert in boxing and _la savate_. As the Deep One tried to close with him again, he let it, then slipped inside the swiping claws to land a heavy body-punch. His opponent grunted and staggered back, allowing Wimsey to follow up with a roundhouse kick to the ribs. As an Englishman, he considered kicking to be ungentlemanly, but since his opponent was not even human, much less English, it didn't count. The Deep One gave a croaking growl and lunged again. But by now it was in pain and off-balance. Wimsey stepped in and landed a thundering left on where the things' jaw would have been if it had one. The Deep One went over backwards and didn't move again.

Jones' leather jacket had defeated the claws and allowed him to get some distance. Now the bull-whip he always carried came into play. He lashed at the side of his assailants' neck, where he saw the tell-tale lines of gill-slits. The blow struck home, causing the Deep One to squeal in pain. Jones' next strike put out one of the bulging eyes. The Deep One turned and staggered away.

Delapore had been in the lead heading for the tunnel, so the third Deep One had had to move round the melee to reach him. That proved its undoing, as it met the clergymans' Derringer pistol. Small the weapon might be, but at point-blank range it was deadly enough.

But more Deep Ones were emerging from the pool. Jones and Wimsey both dew their pistols and fired simultaneously. Two Deep Ones fell back into the pool and no more appeared.

"Go!" Jones said. "You lead, Wimsey, then the Reverend, I'll watch our backs!"

The passage was low and narrow for a few yards, then opened into a room. A small room, dimly lit by a single electric lantern and rank with the smell of unwashed human bodies. Lying in small heaps around the place was a collection of grubby, disreputable clothing.

"Must be where the cultists undressed." Delapore said. "Evidently we scared them too much for them to pick up their things on the way out."

"Must've been that cannon of yours, Wimsey." Jones said. "God knows what would've happened if they'd seen your face!"

"Shudder to think, old chap." Wimsey replied. "Mass suicide would've been the least of it!

"Got a door here, Jones."

The doorway they had entered by did indeed sport a door. Ancient, heavy and iron-bound, with massive hinges and bolts that looked recently oiled. Even so, it took both Wimsey and Jones to close the thing and shoot the bolts.

"They won't," Wimsey noted, "get through that in a hurry, even if they do follow us."

"All we have to do is reach the open air." Jones told him. "Those things won't want to risk being seen. Not by anyone likely to be believed."

They carried on. The tunnel was wider now, with a steady upward trend, and an hours' walking brought them to a gaping hole through which filtered sunlight shone. The hole was in the wall of an underground room with the remains of stalls and troughs.

"Some kind of stable." Jones said. "Weird place to put one."

"Probably for smugglers' ponies or horses." Wimsey said. "Remember what the landlord told us about the gangs round here?"

"There's been a door here, once." Delapore noted. "Now it's just overgrown. You can see where some of our friends pushed their way through."

They emerged into a dry dike, near the ruins of an old cottage.

"We're back on the Marsh!" Wimsey said. "If I'm any judge, that's Dymchurch over there. It's only about four in the afternoon, so we should be back in plenty of time for an early dinner. Then we can pick up the car tomorrow and be in London for lunch."

Later that evening, they examined their find.

"It's not a tusk." Wimsey noted. "Not with that cutting edge. A tooth? Can't imagine any beast with a tooth six feet long!"

"Some kind of dinosaur, maybe?" Delapore hazarded.

Jones shook his head. "Guy called Brown found a couple skeletons over in the States in the 1900s of a big predator he called Tyrannosaurus. That ran to forty feet long, but only had six-inch teeth. By that scale, a dinosaur with this for a tooth would have to be nearly five hundred feet long! I'm pretty sure we'd have found something that big by now!"

He examined the Claw more closely. "I'd figured this for a tusk that some smart guy sharpened on the edge to make it look like a claw, but I don't see any tool marks. It's no kind of ivory I ever saw before, either."

"The blunt end is blackened, as if it's been burnt or scorched." Wimsey noted.

"The old stories say that War had a sword called Chaoseater, that burned as well as cut." Delapore told them. "Whoever made this must have known that and scorched the end to make it look like the legend."

"Well, we can't make anything of it here." Jones said. "I'm sure the guys at the Museum'll be pleased with it, though."

None of them slept well that night. Had they mentioned this fact to one another, they might have been surprised at the similarity of their dreams. Dreams about submerged, weed-grown Cyclopean cities of disturbingly odd geometry.

They were indeed back in London by lunchtime, and it was with a certain unspoken relief that they handed the Claw over to officials at the Museum. An invitation to dine at his club was extended by Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust, and though the Diogenes was not one of the more popular clubs in London, the food was excellent.

The following days' newspapers gave some cause for amusement, reporting as they did the discovery of 'several naked lunatics' running loose on Romney Marsh. Most had been caught trying to steal food, clothes or both. According to the papers, all were found to be "in a state of near-imbecility" and the local asylums and sanitoria had been canvassed without success. It was announced that the Squire of Dymchurch, Sir Charles Cobtree, had undertaken to see that they were cared for until their families could be found.

Then it was time for Delapore and Jones to return home. Wimsey saw them off, with promises to stay in touch and a standing invitation to dinner if either were ever in London again. Life moved back into its accustomed groove.

"No, the chaps at the Museum don't know what to make of the dashed thing!" Sir Pellinore regarded the long package in front of him with some disgust. "It's definitely animal in origin, they tell me. But it's not like any tooth or tusk or claw of any beast known in nature or anything prehistoric that we know of.

"Several of them even claim it couldn't come from Earth at all!"

"Which is why you sent for me?" The voice was a rumbling basso that emerged from the blue-black, spade-shaped beard of the man sitting opposite Sir Pellinore. A short man, but one with immense breadth of shoulder and chest, thick arms and large hands. The masterful, intolerant grey-blue eyes were fixed on the package.

"Exactly, Challenger." Sir Pellinore said. "If it isn't from Earth, it belongs at Torchwood. If it is, you'll find out soon enough, and you'll know where it does belong.

"Can you take it now? I'm not one of those over-sensitive types, but the damned thing gives me the creeps."

"I think it best that I do." Professor Challenger replied. "As Director of the Torchwood Institute, I would be remiss in my duties if I were not to take the item into my custody promptly."

"Well, you're welcome to it!" Sir Pellinore said feelingly. "Goodnight, Challenger."

It was in the October of that year that Dr Jones received a letter from England. It contained a brief note and a newspaper cutting. The note read:

 _Dear Jones,_

 _Hope you're keeping well, old chap. Enclosed is a little something I thought might interest you in light of what we happened on in the spring._

 _All a bit coincidental for my liking, and the explanation seems a bit too pat. I've half a mind to ask Sir Pellinore, but I've a notion I'd like the answers even less than he'd like the questions._

 _I've sent a copy to the Padre as well -thought he'd be interested. Anyway, draw your own conclusions._

 _Kind regards,_

 _Wimsey_

The clipping was an article from the London _Times_.

" **Anchester Coroner Returns Verdict in Norrys Death**

 _Tragic accident ends life of local hero_

Readers will remember that in August we were sad to report the sudden death of Captain Edward Norrys, DFC, of Anchester. The inquest into the death was delayed for some weeks due to certain circumstances pertaining to the incident, and the unavailability of key witnesses. Now, however, the inquest has been held, and the Coroner has returned a verdict of Accidental Death.

It will be remembered that in August of this year, Captain Norrys was part of a group investigating unusual occurrences at Exham Priory. The Priory, which had lain in ruins for centuries, had lately been restored by an American descendant of the de la Poer family. Shortly after moving in, the new owner – an elderly man of sober habits – noted a number of unusual phenomena related to the foundations of the structure. Anxious to assure the safety of his property, and in light of certain old legends appertaining to the house and family, he and Captain Norrys brought together a group of experts, led by the distinguished archaeologist, Sir William Brinton.

Investigation of the sub-cellar of the Priory apparently uncovered an entrance to an extensive network of tunnels and caves within the limestone escarpment upon which the Priory stands. Exploration of these caves was interrupted, and indeed ended, by the death of Captain Norrys and the incapacitation of both Mr de la Poer and Mr Thornton, the noted 'psychic investigator'.

We can now reveal that Capt Norrys suffered a fall into a crevasse within the cave, suffering terrible injuries from sharp rocks on which he seems to have been impaled. It seems from evidence given by Sir William and others, that Capt Norrys had been overcome by mephitic vapours arising from fissures in the rock, the chemical composition of which is unique.

The account given is that Mr de la Poer and Mr Thornton were both overcome by these vapours whilst attempting to rescue or recover Capt Norrys. Both are now mentally incapacitated, with no recovery expected, and have been confined at a sanatorium outside London.

In evidence, Sir William deposed that long-term exposure to these vapours might account for the vicious reputation of the de la Poer family. In light of this, and of the dubious safety of the building, it has been decided that Exham Priory be demolished and the caves beneath collapsed with explosives. Our correspondent reports that this announcement has been greeted with unconcealed delight by local people, who still fear and despise the place."


End file.
